ELI5
What is electricity exactly and how is it caused? I hear multiple things like it’s the movement of electrons, but that doesn’t make sense to me cause electrons are always moving. Isn’t it wave energy that travels by means of electrons?
I also don’t understand Voltage visually. I understand it’s the amount of joules in a Coulomb, but what would the difference be on a small level? What would be the difference physically and visually at 1volt to 1000volts on the atomic level?
In: Physics
*also don’t understand Voltage visually*
Don’t try. If you really want to understand then you have to let go of your conceived notions of the world because things get really weird fast and your understanding of the world from your experiences will cloud your ability to really get what is going on.
Voltage is a strange concept but it can be described with an allegory. Say you are standing with your arm out holding a baseball. The *potential* energy is the meter it will fall from your hand based on the force of gravity. It is potential because it is bottled up in your arm. Now, imagine there is a stack of marbles in a tube that reach up from your arm and touch your hand. Now rest your hand on that stack of marbles. The ‘voltage’ is the pressure exerted on that stack. Except, in actuality there is no ‘pressure’ and there are free electrons in that stack of marbles that do actually move as a result of this voltage. In real electricity, the conductive material is our stack of marbles, the marbles are electrons, and some of those marbles are free to move about and others are attached to atoms that from the structure of the conductive material.
Now, lets apply this concept. I have a stationary magnet with another magnet that can spin around the stationary magnet. I can spin the magnet by attaching it to a windmill or something. The voltage is caused by the magnets spinning, when the fields are far apart from each other there is a bunch of *potential* energy either in positive or negative. For us, positive and negative don’t matter, we care about the difference to zero. In order to produce voltage that wasn’t created by some other electrical force, we need some mechanical energy source, like the wind, a river, an ICE motor, whatever.
This is dramatically simplified, and I think my allegories are flawed if you examine those very closely. What I want to avoid is the idea that a wire is a tube full of flowing electrons, sometimes it behaves like that (which is why it is a popular comparison) but it isn’t quite realistic. Some people will say that it is like a tube full of water with pressure exerted on one end and on the other is some thing that will do work as a result of that pressure, it is kinda sorta like that but not really.
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