Now take the charged sphere and connect it to ground with a wire. At the moment you connect it, what happens to the unbound charges that are on the surface of the sphere?
what happens to the unbound charges that are on the surface of the sphere?
That's what I'm asking. Are you're saying that yes, I can draw a spark from the exterior of a perfect, unbroken, hollow metal sphere containing a van de Graaff generator and some batteries, or otherwise detect that there's any electrostatic activity inside the sphere whatsoever?
(Actually I don't even see how a net charge can be produced inside such an unbroken conductor, thinking about it further. The VDG can only move charge around, it can't create a net imbalance inside the sphere. So the question becomes, what could? I have a feeling that while the corrected version of Feynman's statement is right in principle, it presumes a condition that can't actually exist in nature, like a magnetic monopole.)
> Are you're saying that yes, I can draw a spark from the exterior of a perfect, unbroken, hollow metal sphere containing a van de Graaff generator and some batteries, or otherwise detect that there's any electrostatic activity inside the sphere whatsoever?
I prefer to reason about the simplest cases but since you asked again: if the total charge inside an unbroken ungrounded conducting sphere is zero the field outside it will always be zero, no matter how many VdGs are inside it.
