My wife and I were talking about the best way to avoid getting struck by lighting, and I was saying you want to avoid being the path of least resistance by staying in your car, or making yourself a small ball and staying on your toes when my wife asked this question.
In: Physics
So, I have a story to corroborate what others are saying.
A few years ago I got incredibly lucky with a lightning strike. I’m an avid salmon/steelhead angler, so during the late summer-early spring I spend every waking moment on the river, weather be damned. Some of the best fishing for these fish is when its overcast and rainy. My dad and I went out one day with our spey rods knowing a storm was coming (yeah, bright idea carrying a 13′ graphite rod out wading waist deep in the river) and while we were out we could hear thunder in the distance but it was miles out so we didn’t think to hard about it; just another day steelheading. While standing in the river I remember feeling the temperature drop rapidly, and this tingling feeling in my arms, not like they were asleep, but like static, then I heard a faint fizzing sound, and then CRACK! lightening struck the top of a tree not 20 feet behind me as a torrential downpour started. I got incredibly lucky that the quickest path ended up being an oak tree and not my body that day. I like to think its because of the neoprene booties in my waders and thick rubber soles on my boots, but in reality I just got lucky.
The electricity goes everywhere, but concentrates where the most current can freely flow, or “the path of least resistance.”
To add to the other comments – one concept not commonly understood about electricity – it is pulled, not pushed.
Amps (the measure of electrons flowing in one point of a circuit) are a result of the pull.
Volts are the degree of the momentum of the pull.
Watts are the product of the two.
Resistance is a variable of a circuit.
Electricity in general doesn’t stay on a “path of least resistance”, in the same way that water doesn’t stay in only the widest river.
A hard-topped car is a good place to duck into, if you’re caught in a lightning storm, because the metal acts as a conducting cage surrounding you. Rubber “insulating” tires are irrelevant — motorcycles are not safe.
If you’re absolutely caught in the open, some sources have said you should put distance between yourself & any nearby tall things, put your hands on your head, crouch with your elbows on your knees, and “hope” you redirect some electric current away from your heart, through your arms. Staying outside in the “crouch” is not a first choice, though, as mentioned here: https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-crouch
Pretty much like how clogged roads behave. More cars will move on a 4 lane highway than on a parallel sand road when each car just picks the first spot on the road it can find.
Electrons are repulsive to each other.
High resistance usually means there are not a lot of spots for electrons to go to, or they are stalled by hitting atoms. How ever if there are still electrons in the path new ones can’t follow because they are pushed back. So they pick another path to get to the lower potential.
Imagine having a bunch of small marbles in a funnel and a very steep and a less steep ramp at the exit. They will go on both ramps, but the steep one will move the majority of marbles.
It doesn’t, it goes all the ways, and lots of electricity goes the way that has low resistance, and not much electricity goes the way that has high resistance, and the low resistance way sucks all the electricity away from the high resistance way.
electricity doesn’t flow through the path of least resistance. If that were the case a power plant would send all it’s power to one load. It flows through all available paths in a rate proportional to each path’s resistance.
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