eli5 Electricity

Question

So electricity always tries to find the fastest way to ground right? So say you get shocked and it goes through you. Where does electricity go when it goes into the ground. Thank you

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Answer 1

There’s a lot of overlap between electricity flowing and fluids flowing. In both there is current, resistance, but in electricity there is voltage too. Voltage equivalent in fluid dynamics is kinda like how strongly strongly a fluid wants to flow somewhere. Like water pressure pushing a fluid to flow strongly in one direction.

Building upon this analogy, ground is where there is no ‘water pressure’ since the ground can typically just keep on taking more electrical charge without practically ever getting full. That doesn’t mean that electricity always wants to flow there. If for instance you have a high negative charge area full of electrons, that’s a lot like having water under pressure. It may flow outward towards ground if given the chance, but it’ll prefer flowing to a area of high positive charge to neutralize it’s own charge. That’s a lot like there being a vacuum in our fluids analogy.

Once this vacuum/positive charge area sucks up so much water/electrons that it becomes neutral, taking on any more water/electrons actually puts it negatively charge/pressurized. At which point the electrons/water prefer to flow to the neutral place, or ground.

To answer your question about where electricity goes when it shocks you, that only happens when your body is the path of least resistance to flow somewhere where it can neutralize it’s charge. It’s a bit like a bottle being so pressurized it overcomes the resistance of the cap containing it to violently pop it’s cap.

Electricians often work on wires one handed to prevent this. They’re acting like a bottle in this regard. A bit of charge can flow into them but then they become ‘pressurized’ with no where else for more charge to flow. Touching charged wires with two hands is potentiality forming a pipe from one arm to the other with their heart in the middle. Electricity may flow from the high charged area to the low from one arm to the other and paralyze the heart on the way.