Static Electricity is simple in theory, but hard to observe directly. Why? How do you directly observe electrons moving from surface to surface? To observe s

Static Electricity is simple in theory, but hard to observe directly. Why? How do you directly observe electrons moving from surface to surface? To observe something directly you basically need to bounce stuff off of it and observe where that stuff goes. e.g. Bouncing hundreds of ping-pong balls off of a basketball and tracing their trajectories will give you a pretty good idea of the basketball's outline. We do this all the time just by opening our eyes and observing light that is scattered/reflected/radiated by the objects around us. Unfortunately, we start to run into quantum limits when we try to observe electrons. Observing electrons with photons is like observing that same basketball by bouncing cannonballs off of it. We can reasonably expect to hit the basketball and maybe even observe a tiny deflection in the first cannonball, but the basketball will be long gone before we can fire a second cannonball and we need several deflections to get even a rudimentary image! Things only get harder if we want to know things like the basketball's position and speed! Electrons themselves are one of the preferred tiny things to bounce off of other tiny things to observe them (e.g. electron microscopy), but bouncing basketballs off of basketballs doesn't work very well either. What about quarks you say? Great idea! Or, it would be if quarks were stable enough to travel even the microscopic distances required. Also, quarks are charged... So there you have it. Static electricity is hard to observe directly because of quantum limits on observation. We can only make indirect observations and see how well they agree with the theory. On the bright side, there is at least some hope of detecting the transfer of molecules.