Recently, I have stumbled upon a YouTube video by Veritasium describing the conductivity of fire. My question is: how exactly does fire conduct electricity? I am a high school student; therefore appropriate language is expected.
[Physics] Does Fire Conduct Electricity? Why
electricityionslightningplasma-physics
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Interesting, but I'm don't think you are asking the right questions in the context of law.
The point is that electrons and electricity are completely irrelevant when it comes to the question of "tangible" and "electronic" "goods". You will obtain a good answer only if you forget about electricity, which just happens to be a convenient physical carrier of information, and focus on the objects that might or might not be goods like a chair or a pen. A proper question would be this: "Is a newspaper article a good, like a chair or a pen?". Specifying whether the newspaper article is written on paper or "on electrons" or on something else is besides the point because the concept of "newspaper article" is entirely independent of the material it is written on.
To put it more pointedly: if you have to know the metaphysical nature of electricity to make a law about newspapers, you're definitely doing it wrong. ;-)
Keeping in mind that your questions and their answers are completely useless in the context of law, I can now proceed to answer them.
I don't know of any good analogy to electricity that captures it properly. It is like gravitation in that distant bodies attract each other, except that in electricity, bodies can also repel each other. Furthermore, the gravitational pull of, say, a chair is so small that we don't think of a chair as attracting us gravitationally. This is also why the water analogy doesn't work so well: water does not attract other water from afar. The "cause" for attraction/repulsion is the electrical charge.
The carriers of charge, like electrons or ions (= atoms with electrons missing) do have a mass. You can think of them as tiny, charged balls flying around through space (keep in mind that a copper wire consist of mostly empty space, too). On the other hand, electrical current does not have a mass, just like a water current does not have a mass, it simply doesn't make sense. (Both imply a mass current, however.) Likewise, electricity is a general term and does not have a mass, just like "law" and "liberty" don't have a mass.
The mass of a copper wire is the sum of the masses of its constituents, some of which are electrons. However, the number electrons exiting a copper wire is usually the same as the number of electrons entering the copper wire, so its mass does not change. In any case, the mass of electrons is way too small to make more than a negligible contribution to the total mass of the wire anyway.Again, "electricity" is a general term. The link you mentioned refers to electric current, which is the same as flow of charge. Basically, the link says that electrons are not the only tiny balls that carry a charge. This is indeed the case. It's just that in the common case of metals, electrical current is usually carried by electrons.
This question is not well-posed. Again, electricity is a very general term and encompasses things like electric field, electric current, electric charge etc. For instance, light is part of electricity as well, because it's an electromagnetic wave.
At atmospheric pressure, air and other gases are poor conductors (Insulators) of electricity. Because, they don't have any free electrons to carry current. But, once the free electrons are produced in gas by ionization (they become plasmas), electric discharge occurs.
This could be done in many ways such as by applying a large potential difference across a gas column at very low pressure, or by allowing high frequency EM-waves such as the X-Rays through the gas. This question is not proper to ask. Indeed, gases become plasmas once they're ionized!
All dielectrics have a certain value of breakdown potential. In most of them like air, ceramics, etc. (including semiconductors like Silicon), this potential provides sufficient energy to ionize a few atoms. The free electrons formed as a result of this ionization are energized enough to bump the neighborhood atoms, break some covalent bonds and produce more free electrons.
These free electrons are then accelerated by the applied electric field and they collide and ionize the other atoms to produce more free electrons (multiplication by collision). Now, there are large number of free electrons available for current flow. Thus, an electric arc is produced!
However, this isn't applicable for all gases. As @mikuszefski has mentioned, there are a few other cases such as the noble gases which are mono-atomic (and are used in most of the discharge tubes), whose breakdown potentials are only meant to ionize them!
Best Answer
This video illustrates how a candle flame conducts a high voltage (10,000 volts). Although the ion density is small in a candle flame, they are sufficiently present to conduct electricity.