What’s the difference between negative and ground in circuits?
In: Engineering
“Ground” is a common reference in a circuit, the “zero”, to which all other electrical potentials on that circuit are compared. It just so happens that in a lot of electrical systems it’s literally the ground, because it’s really difficult to do anything to change it’s potential even if you dump a bunch of charge into it, and so it’s a stable reference. But in the car it’ll be the chassis, etc. It serves the double purpose as a safety measure by making sure there’s no charge building up anywhere (because everything is connected to everything else), because that charge suddenly shorting (say, if you touch it) could hurt you or the device.
It’s just a really common convention to connect the negative terminal to ground. But you could connect all the positives. It doesn’t matter as long as you’re consistent in your circuit.
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