Electric fields are like gravitational fields in a couple of important ways. They both have forces that act at a distance. Remember with the gravitational field, in order to walk up stairs, you are doing work (exerting a force) against the pull of gravity. Your body naturally wants to be at the ground level, and it takes work to get it up a flight of stairs. You move from a lower potential energy to a higher potential energy as you walk up those stairs. When you walk up the stairs, you are adding gravitational potential energy to your body. And it doesn't matter how wacky the staircase is... it can have curves, dips, switchbacks, and more... but it's only the beginning and end points that we care about when calculating the gravitational potential energy.Electric Potential Difference.
[am4show have='p9;p58;' guest_error='Guest error message' user_error='User error message' ] Electric fields work the same way, except with charges. In order to move a charge in an electric field against the way it naturally wants to go, you have to do work on it by applying an external force. This work done adds to the potential energy of the charge in the form of electrical potential energy. And it doesn't matter what the path is that the charge takes between the two points... it's only the beginning and ends points that matter. Both the electrostatic and gravitational forces are conservative forces.
When you walk up a flight of stairs, the amount of gravitational potential energy stored in your body depends on two things: your mass and the height of the stairs. A person twice your size will have twice the potential energy, as will you if you walk up two flights of stairs instead of one. If we divide the gravitational potential energy term by mass, then we can find the gravitational potential per kg for an object that doesn't care how massive an object is and only cares where it's located.
So the bottom line is that if you move a charged particle in an electric field, the potential energy also changes. Moving it in against the direction of an electric field would be like climbing up a flight of stairs, because you're going against the nature of gravity and it requires work to get up those stairs. Going down a flight of stairs equates to losing potential energy, the same which holds true with a charged particle moving with the nature of the electric field (it will also lost electric potential energy).
[am4show have='p9;p58;' guest_error='Guest error message' user_error='User error message' ] Electric fields work the same way, except with charges. In order to move a charge in an electric field against the way it naturally wants to go, you have to do work on it by applying an external force. This work done adds to the potential energy of the charge in the form of electrical potential energy. And it doesn't matter what the path is that the charge takes between the two points... it's only the beginning and ends points that matter. Both the electrostatic and gravitational forces are conservative forces.
So the bottom line is that if you move a charged particle in an electric field, the potential energy also changes. Moving it in against the direction of an electric field would be like climbing up a flight of stairs, because you're going against the nature of gravity and it requires work to get up those stairs. Going down a flight of stairs equates to losing potential energy, the same which holds true with a charged particle moving with the nature of the electric field (it will also lost electric potential energy).
You are right – electrical charges are everywhere! When you get yourself a piece of tape, there’s a static charge on the tape itself from un-sticking from itself (you can see this if you’ve ever tried to delicately tape two pieces of paper together, only to have them rise up to meet the tape when you hover just above the paper). When you take socks out of the dryer, slide down a plastic slide, and so on. You can build instruments to detect electrical charge like the “Electroscope” (https://www.sciencelearningspace2.com/2013/08/cosmic-ray-detector/) and the “Alien Detector” (https://www.sciencelearningspace2.com/2010/03/advanced-static-electricity-experiment-alien-detector/)
In the static electricity and balloon activities, we purposely built up a negative charge in the balloon and then observed what happened in situations of induction and conduction. What about objects we come near or touch through out the day–what sort of electrical field changes or movements are going on, and is there a way to sense it?