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
Electricity is a relative phenomenon. Charge is a static property of some particles, like the electron and the proton. These are not the same thing.
If you have an object with lots of unbalanced change (more electrons than protons or vice verse) it produces a static electric field in the region around it, even if that region is a vacuum. From any point outside the charged object, the strength of that static field can be measured, in volts. 1 volt is a small gang of extra electrons and 1000 volts is huge crowd of extra electrons. This is not the absolute voltage, it’s the differential voltage between the object with the crowd and the point in space.
Electrons can move through things that are “conductive”. Lots of things are poor conductors, like air, and a few things are good conductors, like things made of copper or gold. Electricity is “net movement” of the electrons. It’s not the electrons circling around and around their atom’s nucleus, only when they travel from atom to atom across the object. This travel is powered by the fact that electrons repel each other, if you put a free electron in a static electric field it moves away from the object with net electric charge.
This movement of many electrons, called a current, creates a magnetic field and heats the object being traveled through (unless it is a superconductor). Good conductors are heated less, allowing the electrons to get where they are going faster, leading to a rule of electrons taking “the path of least resistance”.
Electricity can travel through things that are poor conductors, if the crowd of excess electric charge is large enough. Lightning is an example of electrons flowing through air (a poor conductor) at such a high current that they ionize the gas molecules (making them a better conductor) allowing a huge current to travel to ground.
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