I swear this isn’t a troll question, it’s always been my understanding that electricity takes the path of least resistance, and silver is one of the best conducting metals, so if you did the sterotypical stick a fork in a power socket why does the power do anything to you when it can go through the much less resistive silver?
In: Physics
The power isn’t one continuous cylinder choosing which way to go. Some of it chooses to flow into you. I like to use a water analogy when explaining electricity.
Normally you have a faucet pouring water over stuff that falls down into the sink. Easy peasy and good.
But if you put a spoon in the path of the water, the water will splash every which way. It still might ultimately flow down into the drain, but the path it takes is bad for anyone is splash range.
And to get away from the analogy, your body is part of a parallel circuit. Upon sticking in the fork, your body has zero charge and for a split second all that power will want to flow to you rather than the path over the fork to the negative socket. That’s bad, and you get zapped. After that initial flow to your skin capacitance, it might still want to flow inside of you and overcome your skin’s resistance. That’s also bad cause heat happens. But let’s say you reach an equilibrium there. Even then an electron in the fork has a choice of flowing out the other tong of the fork to the ground socket, or flowing through you. MOST of the electrons will flow straight to ground and ignore you. But SOME will still go through your body and then back through the fork to ground, simply because so many other electrons are going over the fork and pushing them out.
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