How does electricity figure out if you’re standing on an insulator or not?

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So as we know for a person to get electrocuted a circuit needs to be completed. You cannot stand on a wooden chair and get electrocuted. So when you stand on a wooden chair and touch a live wire, how does the electricity figure out that you’re standing on an insulator? Does the electricity pass through you first before failing to complete the circuit because of the wood?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

I want to point out another relevant fact that address your fundamental misunderstanding. Other people had given you various analogy like “stuck in a traffic jam”, but you don’t even need that to explain the phenomenon. Electron is capable of detecting things far away from the path that it moves. Even when you have a single lone electron, it is capable of detecting multiple future paths and know which one is hard to move through and avoid moving there in the first place. So you don’t even need a “stuck in the traffic jam” analogy to explain this phenomenon.

A different analogy is like this. Imagine there is a car come across a fork on a lone road, one path has a collapsed bridge miles ahead. How do the car avoid the road with collapsed bridge? It splits into 2 copies of itself, and move on both path. The copy that the reach the bridge stops, but the other one arrive. At the end, when asked about what happened, the car only know that it go through the unobstructed road because the copy that see the collapsed bridge never arrived, so from the outsider’s perspective, the car avoid the road with collapsed bridge as if it knows.

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