electrical forces between charges are enormous relative to gravitational forces.?

Question

yet, we normally don't sense electrical forces between us and our environment, while we do sense our gravitational interaction with the earth. why is this so?

Answer 1

The reason why we don't feel electric forces is because most everything has nearly perfectly balanced amounts of positive and negative charges, so that they're electrically neutral. But there is no such thing as an "gravitionally neutral" object that has mass. So everything wants to stick together gravitionally.

Here's another way to look at this. Because electrical forces are so much more powerful, it takes very little time for positive and negative charged particles to come together in more or less equal numbers. Atoms are a good example of this. Kind of like "everybody's married now, can't find any singles". However, gravitational forces being very weak, things are "still" in the process of coming together, and astrophysicists think that it could be billions or even trillions in the future before everything does finally come together... if ever.

Answer 2

Forces Between Charges

Answer 3

The gravitational constant is much smaller than the respective electric and magnetic constants, hence the smaller force. However, the earth is a concentration of a huge amount of matter, so that you can feel its gravitational pull.

Most of our environment consists of atoms and molecules, the vast majority of which are electrically neutral; most isolated ions naturally combine to form compounds or are found in solution. Hence, contact with a significant isolated charge is rare, aside from lightening, electrical outlets, etc (I'm ignoring the sparks you can generate walking on carpet, etc.)

Ordinary matter all has positive mass (execept for exotic theories), so that the only way to neutralize mass is to accelerate at the same rate as gravity (i.e. zero gravity).

Answer 4

The previous poster is correct. The force between two charges (electrical force) happens to be about 10^16 times greater than the gravitational force between those same objects at the same distance. If this was not the case, atomic structure could not form as it is today and nothing would exist as we know it.

Answer 5

Most objects are electrically neutral or near neutral, so the net force to any other object is near zero. There is a lot of force, but it is all balanced

Answer 6

simple we are not heavily charged...if you could survive being heavily positive for a while you would notice the attraction far more accutely