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
That’s a great question! Electricity needs a complete circuit to flow through and harm you. When you touch a wire and you’re not grounded, your body doesn’t complete the circuit, so the electricity doesn’t harm you. It’s kind of like a broken road that doesn’t allow cars to pass through.
It’s like having an open window to a room with no other windows open vs opening a window with an open window on the other side of the room.
Electricity wants to go home. Home is ground and you aren’t on electricity’s GPS leading to home. It doesn’t want to take a detour to get home, so why would it run through you?
Just want to add to all the other comments that have already answered the question, I really wouldn’t say you won’t get harmed, especially on mains AC electricity.
Keep in mind that even if you’re not grounded, you are still capacitively coupled towards ground (or if you’re a linesman somehow, towards the other AC phases as well). Depending on the amount of capacitance between you and ground, the impedance between you and ground might be low enough for enough current to pass through you towards ground to shock you, at 50-60 Hz mains frequency.
To put it in simpler terms, you’re a capacitor towards ground, AC electricity passes through capacitors, you can get shocked.
P.S: This can happen as well on DC, but IIRC you need a lot higher DC voltage for you to be shocked if you’re not grounded, and through a completely different phenomenon that is dielectric breakdown.
Electricity goes where it encounters the least resistance. When you touch a wire a very small amount of electricity goes into your body and circulates in it, kinda like to scout the way. If it doesn’t find you related to the ground or anything with little resistance it comes back to the wire and says “nope, not that way” to the rest of the current. This scouting is much faster than the rest of the current and happens for thunder as well. This is how lignthing bolts find their way to the ground through the atmosphere.
Electricity is just the movement of electrons through a medium. It has to have somewhere to go or it can’t move. If it can’t move it can’t do any work, and it needs to do work to cause any damage.
I think most people are not getting your question right.
Yes, when you touch a live wire, you are becoming part of the wire. Hence electricity will flow through your body. If you touch a live wire with your left hand touching one point and right hand touching another point few inches apart, then electricity will enter your body through one hand, travel through your body to the wire through your other hand.
So, to answer your question, yes, some current will always flow through your body.
Now, why doesn’t it harms you? It will harm you (or even fry you) if the amount of current in the wire is sufficiently large.
Let’s say, the live wire is carrying 40,000 Ampere of current, then touching it (without being grounded) will BBQ you. But the wire that carry current to your refrigerator is carrying anywhere from just 2 Amperes to 8 Amperes of current. Distribution line from your local transformer that powers the neighborhood is carrying around 100 Amperes to 1000 Amperes current.
Other commenters saying “Electricity takes least path of resistance” is too much ELIF5 that it would fail to answer your question.
The real answer is “Electricity will take ALL AVAILABLE PATHS. BUT MOST OF IT WILL TAKE THE EASIEST (least resistance) ROUTE”. So, since your body has a resistance much higher than a copper/aluminum wire, only a small portion of electricity will take their path through your body, while the majority will take the easy route through the wire.
The way I managed to fully understand current – think of electricity as water.
In this case that you’re questioning, think of a barrel full of water. When you’re grounded, think of opening a hole in that barrel, at ground level. If you’re not grounded, then you’re opening a hole above the level of the water.
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