![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mellowtiggerAround 25 years ago, a guy at church mentioned something that's stuck in my mind since then. He'd been a plumber for ages, and he'd seen changes in how pipes corrode over the course of his career. He was of the opinion that the earth did not have the same electrical potential that it did in the past. He thought that so much equipment was being "grounded" that the the soil now carried a different charge than it used to.
I vaguely remember my father around this same time period mentioning problems at the Texas Instrument plant where he worked. They grounded such powerful electrical equipment that they were having problems locating a neutral ground for some new sensitive stuff they were working with.
Technically, "ground" is just a reference point, someplace to measure the difference with another charge. The earth does change its electrical charge naturally, There are various kinds of lightning, but the most common has electrons in the ground rushing to meet positively-charged areas of clouds. (The opposite does occur too.)
We measure soil for its various qualities that promote plant well-being. Things like its clay content, it's chemical pH, its moisture... but what about it's electrical state? What if various microbes prefer a certain electrical state for best health? What if we're changing their environment in yet another way by grounding all of our equipment throughout a city? Google searches find me lots of articles about bacteria that produce electricity to be harvested, but I can't find much on the reverse where the electrical environment is used to heal/harm the bacteria. I found only one that mentioned a pulsed electric field being used to kill bacteria to improve pasteurization.
I vaguely remember my father around this same time period mentioning problems at the Texas Instrument plant where he worked. They grounded such powerful electrical equipment that they were having problems locating a neutral ground for some new sensitive stuff they were working with.
Technically, "ground" is just a reference point, someplace to measure the difference with another charge. The earth does change its electrical charge naturally, There are various kinds of lightning, but the most common has electrons in the ground rushing to meet positively-charged areas of clouds. (The opposite does occur too.)
We measure soil for its various qualities that promote plant well-being. Things like its clay content, it's chemical pH, its moisture... but what about it's electrical state? What if various microbes prefer a certain electrical state for best health? What if we're changing their environment in yet another way by grounding all of our equipment throughout a city? Google searches find me lots of articles about bacteria that produce electricity to be harvested, but I can't find much on the reverse where the electrical environment is used to heal/harm the bacteria. I found only one that mentioned a pulsed electric field being used to kill bacteria to improve pasteurization.