I’ve always heard that electricity follows the shortest path – for instance, lightning will use your body for a conduit if you’re the tallest thing around. How exactly does that work?
In: Planetary Science
It is very convenient to imagine electricity like water. The water doesn’t know where the ocean is but it will find the path to it. It travels down the nearest downward slope because that way has lower gravitational energy. It continue until it finds the lowest energy state it can like the ocean or a depression. It will fill that depression until it overflows into the next area. This is it overcoming the gravitational energy, or resistance, to get over the next obstacle. Sometimes the water can overflow into many areas at once but one of them will allow more water than others and this will erode that path until it is the only path the water takes. Electricity does a similar thing.
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