We finally have an answer: The beginning and the end of the sliding motion that produces static electricity experience different forces – resulting in a charge differential between the front and the back that results in the crackle of static electricity.
We knew enough to make it extremely useful, but didn’t have a full understanding of the underlying mechanics.
Hate to break it to you, but that is how knowledge works. Even things we have an extremely detailed understanding of are likely to have underlying mechanisms we are not aware of.
You broke nothing, it just annoys me that if you don’t hit university they refuse to teach you the unconfortable truth on plenty of things and you come out of school with a biased idea that everything has been explained already (history, math, physics…).
Maybe you just went to bad schools?
My experience with science and other teachers of every grade was that they stressed how we make new discoveries all the time.
I had wildly different experiences with teachers within my own schools growing up. There was legitimately no standard that valued this kind of nuanced exploration of the world. Just a focus on standardized tests. It was almost entirely on the individual teachers to spend more of their time and effort to go any further than that.
I had some great teachers that made everything interesting and taught us more like the classes I eventually had in college, but I definitely have had more that were like this one math teacher I remember who, when I asked about why we had to do a math problem in a specific way we were learning about, answer something along the lines of “because I say so.”
Maybe I went to bad schools, maybe my country has a dysfunctional education system, but I suspect the matter is widespread because it’s way easier to teach factual information rather than dive into the nuances of how confident we are about our explanations.
Some reductive examples: Pluto is / is not a planet, wings work because the path air takes is longer than on the other side, the cause for this war was xyz, you can’t subtract below 0 (that’s at a very early age of course), this philosopher thought X.
Oh I guess a CRUCIAL one is how most teachers are horribly unfit to answer “Why should I care about this?”, but that’s beside the point, in a way.