By ‘ground’ i mean like when you touch an electric fence, unless you are insulated and not touching the ground underneath you, the electricity will travel through you,
into the floor
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The ground acts like a huge neutral repository of charge. Because it’s so big, you can pretty much dump electrons into it or take them out, and the net positive/negative charge will spread out to become not noticeable. It would take a long concerted effort of systematically taking one charge type and removing it from the atmosphere to change that.
The wire is charged by putting extra electrons into it (really by decreasing the voltage, but the net effect is to make the electrons bunch up). When you connect it to the ground through your body, those electrons flow into your body. Electrons that were at your feet get pushed into the ground.
(Note – a lot of this current flow can use various ions in your body instead of electrons. I am not a chemist.)
If we instead applied a positive charge to the wire, creating a low density area of electrons, the flow of electrons would be up from the ground into your feet, and from your hand into the wire.
The same reason an inflated balloon deflates into the air around it. The Earth is at a lower electrical “pressure” – voltage – than a charged source (charged relative to ground). The voltage/pressure allows the charge to flow – have a current – through a sufficiently conductive path.
electricity does not “always try to go to the ground” by nature. electricity tries to complete its circuit.
in the case of an electric fence the positive wire from the controller is connected to the fence and the negative wire goes to a stake in the ground. when you touch the fence you complete the circuit by connecting the fence to the ground. the ground behaves like a (very poor quality) wire to connect you to the grounding stake and comete the circuit to the controller.
Well in reality, current moves from negative to positive because atoms can only give up and exchange elections which are negatively charged. That means when something has a charge in relation to the earth, it means that it is more negatively charged then the earth is positively charged. Now because everything is always trying to balance itself, when you connect something that has a charge to earth, the current will flow to ground until both sides are equal making them neutral or balanced again.
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