I am currently talking IB Physics and I’ve read the textbook, watched yt vids and asked my teacher but my head can’t seem to wrap around the concept of voltage.
Joules per coulomb, like what? Energy per charge? For what? How do we get there and how is it useful?
Any help appreciated :).
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Everybody here answering what voltage *does*, not what voltage *is*.
Voltage is effectively a measure of the electron surplus or dearth at a location. You get it by pumping electrons from one area to another by some means (changing magnetic fields or applying an external electrostatic field) or using materials that can be manufactured in a state with differing affinities as in a battery. Because opposite charges attract, the excess (negative) wants to flow to the depletion (positive), which gives you its property to drive current.
One of the tricky things about voltage is that it’s a relative measurement. It’s not like some other units, like grams or meters, that exist as freestanding measurements. We measure voltage as a difference from a reference point, usually one referred to as ground or common. A positive voltage has fewer electrons (or, in semiconductors, we’ll say an excess of the pseudo-counter-particle “holes” representing an empty place to store an electron) than reference, while a negative voltage has more.
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