Or will it nevertheless go through my body and wreak havoc like it normally would?
I’m not actually planning on conducting (pun intended) this experiment, just wondering whether the electricity could be “guided” through the body in any predictable way.
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First of all, the “very conductive material” will form a conductive path only if it isn’t insulated, i.e. if it is grounded or connected to a different phase.
To answer your actual question, current WILL flow through your body (alongside a lot more current flowing through your pinky), but less than that in the case where your pinky isn’t touching a grounded conductor—by about 50%. Let me explain.
If your pinky isn’t touching anything, most of the line voltage will gradually drop across your body, or maybe across whatever sits between you and ground (perhaps insulated shoes). That means your hand (let’s say your wrist, specifically) will roughly be at the line voltage, and the current through your body is the line voltage divided by the impedance (essentially resistance in AC circuits) of your body, plus the impedance of your soles, etc.
If your pinky IS touching a grounded conductor, the entire line voltage drops across the short path between the tip of your index finger and the tip of your pinky. The voltage at your wrist is roughly the same as the voltage halfway across this path, which is half of the line voltage. The voltage across your body (i.e. between your wrist and ground) is then roughly half of what it would be if your pinky weren’t grounded, so the current through your body is roughly halved compared to that case.
Fun fact: In engineering school my professor always touched circuit boards with one hand behind his back. He said all old engineers did it that way because they learned on 120v boards where if you accidentally completed the circuit with both hands the electricity would flow through your body and could stop your heart.
Our boards were 5-12v and a whole lot less dangerous.
If you are already clamped before the juice is on, sure. Your hand will act as a resistor. The effect will vary according to the intensity of the potential difference and current.
There is no way to touch two live elements at exactly the same time, so assuming you are using standard 30 amp mains AC current, for a split second the power will enter via one finger and travel anywhere that is “grounded”, and if you manage to make contact with the second finger without being blown backwards and stunned into a blackout, your hand will probably wind up look like a KFC drumstick.
I did pretty much what you said once I touched a live wire with my index finger while my thumb was on the case of the equipment. I was knocked unconscious and I woke up in medical with a path burned through from my finger to my thumb they had to scrape out all the burned tissue and put me on antibiotics to prevent an infection from the dead tissue they couldn’t get. It thoroughly sucked.
Electricity can and will divide the flow into many separate paths, each path carrying that amount of electricity that is proportional to the total amount of current flow and the TOTAL resistance of all paths involved according to Kirchoff’s Law. It can get messy. But…BUT… IF you are sure to keep from grounding any other part of your body, then eliminating any other path to ground for the current, then you are essentially correct.
In engineering school in the late 60s,I still remember when we were first working on television sets in lab. First thing prof said was “If you are right handed, put your LEFT hand in your pocket and KEEP it there. This prevents you from making an accidental second path to ground for the high voltage section, which would probably kill you. Lefties, pocket your right hand. “
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