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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>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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