Okay, so what I would like explained is why does it not affect you when you’re not grounded? In my mind, the opposite would make more sense. Like say you touched an electric wire while standing on the ground, I would imagine the electricity would travel through you and into the ground causing little to no pain. While if you were not grounded and touched a wire, the electricity would have no where to go then it would shoot out of your body or something, but unless I’m mistaken, thats not how it works. Are there any exceptions for this, like say if theres enough volts could it kill you even if you weren’t grounded ? Like if I wasn’t grounded and got hit by lightning it would still probably kill me, right? Also how does grounding work? isn’t everything grounded other than planes or helicopters? I have 0 experience with anything electrical and no idea if its even considered physics so apologies if these are dumb questions- also ESL so sorry for any grammatical errors.
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Electricity does useful stuff and damage when it flows.
Eg, when the current flows through a light bulb, it heats up the filament and makes it glow. Or when if lows through a motor, it creates magnetic fields that get turned into motion.
If there’s no current, the electricity won’t do much.
>Like say you touched an electric wire while standing on the ground, I would imagine the electricity would travel through you and into the ground causing little to no pain
It would flow through you, and do stuff (depending on the voltage, current and AC frequency) such as exciting nerves and muscles (which you experience as an electric shock) to generating heat (electrical burns), or sometimes less harmful things, such as flowing through your skin and not affecting anything internal (eg, very high frequency AC), or having no effect (low current).
>While if you were not grounded and touched a wire, the electricity would have no where to go then it would shoot out of your body or something
If it has nowhere to go, there’s no current. If it shoots out of your body, it does so by moving, that is, it DOES have somewhere to go, and forms a current. An “electric current” is a synonym for “moving electric charge”
>like say if theres enough volts could it kill you even if you weren’t grounded ? Like if I wasn’t grounded and got hit by lightning it would still probably kill me, right?
Everything conducts electricity, but some things do it so badly that they basically don’t. Air, for example. Or rubber. You can hold an insulated household electrical cable with no problem, but you absolutely should avoid (and not use) an electrical cable whose insulation has started to come off.
However, if you push up the voltage enough, it will everntually force anything to start conducting electricity. Voltage is like a “pressure”, trying to force current to move. Just like high enough pressure will eventually crack a water pipe, so high enough voltage will eventually force the insulators to make a way for the current to flow. Lightning is an example of this – a voltage difference forms between the clouds and the ground, until eventually the air is forced to carry the current from the sky to the ground in one massively powerful spark.
>Also how does grounding work? isn’t everything grounded other than planes or helicopters?
Grounding means making a path that’s easy for electricity to flow along, that reaches the ground. In an appliance, that will be the “ground wire”, which will usually be attached to the outside box of the appliance, so if the “current wires” lose their insulation and start leaking current, it can go straight to the ground along this wire. That will trip the RCD’s in your house, since suddenly the appliance is drawing a lot of current. Without the ground wire, YOU might become the de facto ground wire when you touch it, which would not be a good thing. You might not be a very good conductor of electricity, but you’re certainly good enough to get a shock.
The thing that causes the damage and pain is the passage of the electricity through your body. (Think of it like a carpet burn, it only hurts if you have both enough pressure (voltage) and movement (current)).
It’s always looking for a pathway to a lower voltage. If you are off the ground, then the flow won’t pass through you as there is nowhere for it to go. It doesn’t just pile up inside you, it flows somewhere else.
However If the voltage is high enough, and you are off the ground, you could still be electrocuted if your body offers a lower resistance path to a point closer to the ground than the air around you. It’s just that this is an unlikely situation to find yourself in.
>Okay, so what I would like explained is why does it not affect you when you’re not grounded? In my mind, the opposite would make more sense. Like say you touched an electric wire while standing on the ground, I would imagine the electricity would travel through you and into the ground causing little to no pain. While if you were not grounded and touched a wire, the electricity would have no where to go then it would shoot out of your body or something, but unless I’m mistaken, thats not how it works.
Electricity, the flow of charged particles, is a *balancing process*. It’s what happens when a point of high electric potential is connected to a point of low electric potential via a conductor, a material that doesn’t offer a lot of resistance to moving charged particles. The connection allows the different potentials to equalize: charged particles start to move until both points no longer have difference in electric potential. The generators in power plants are machines that deliberately *create* a difference in potential.
You, as a person, no doubt have lots of potential! What you generally do *not* have, is electric potential in reference to other things that are connected to you. That means that, unless you put yourself directly **between** two reference points that have different electric potentials, no electricity will flow to, from or through you, just like no electricity would flow through a lamp if you only connected one single cable to one of its connectors and left the other one unconnected. There’s no-where to flow to or from.
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