I have encountered several articles and posts saying that what electrocute you and cause death is actually not the voltage but the current instead but is not clear to me how this works.
In: Physics
Think of a ball rolling down a hill. More “voltage” is a steeper hill, so the ball will roll faster and have a higher speed at the bottom of the hill. “Voltage” is how much force is actually behind the flow of electrons. With enough force, it can create huge sparks – the most spectacular being lightning. The force can jump huge distances!
A bowling ball rolling down a steep hill is something you likely don’t want to get in front of. But a small marble rolling down that same hill at the same speed can just be blocked with your foot. That’s current – basically the amount of force behind the current. A tiny bit of force with a huge current tends to get spent very quickly, but can easily pass through you. This is how tazers and electric fences work – they give brief pulses of high voltages that hurt like hell.
The total amount of energy (called “power”) would then be analogous to the speed of the ball at the bottom of that hill, combined with the weight of the ball itself. A very low voltage with high current would be like you holding a bowling ball in place with your foot as it was trying to roll down a light incline. You’d feel a light nudge as you stop it, but it wouldn’t hurt. However, that same ball going down a steep hill could well smash through a small wall at the bottom, if it picked up enough speed.
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