I understand why you get harmed if you’re grounded, you’re becoming part of the wire and the electricity is going from you to the earth. what I dont understand is, why the electricity doesnt harm you when youre not touching the ground, isnt it going through you either way? how does it not affect your body?
In: Physics
If you take a short piece of hose and bend it so that the two ends just touch on top of water in a bucket, why doesn’t water run through the hose? In a simple model of the universe, it is because the water would be moving against the gravitational field without an external force to not only cancel out gravity, but to accelerate it up. Or explained in a different way, up higher, things have more gravitational potential energy. Left free to move, things will go to a location or state with lower potential. So when left to move freely, water flows downhill.
In order for electrons to move through a circuit, there has to be a source of electromagnetic potential. It gives the push to the electrons so they will move. As they move, they carry energy, which is what does the work when we plug stuff in. If you are not grounded, you are basically wrapped in a pretty decent insulator, air. The electrons in the wires are feeling an alternating push while in the transmission line due to big magnets being rotated in a generator somewhere. The areas of high potential and low potential are moving back and forth along the length of the wire. When you touch the wire and are grounded, basically you are an extra path the electrons could take, but both your hands are at the same potential. There is an area of lower potential for those electrons to get to, and it isn’t through you. Just like the water in the bucket has an area of lower potential to get to, but not through the hose that goes from the surface of the water into the air and back down.
Edit to add: when you touch a transmission line when grounded, then the electricity will flow through you, because being grounded means you are connected to the neutral Earth. 0 electric potential, more or less. So you become the conduit for all the electrons that are feeling really squished together (high potential, high voltage) and the Earth, where they can be at the lowest potential possible. Like if you cut a hole in the bucket and affix the hose to the side, the water will travel out as long as the end of the hose is below the water level. Bringing the and of the hose above the water level is like disconnecting a ground. The water and the electrons, respectively, will stop flowing.
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