With sufficient voltage, everything is a conductor.
With insufficient voltage, everything is an insulator.
Neither may be conducive to those roles, but everything has some conductivity and some resistance (super conductors being a possible exception).
How about in vacuum? Do you get fancy arcs or glows or what?
In typical conditions, an electrical arc forms when the electric field strength exceeds the dielectric strength of the medium (like air). In a vacuum, there is no medium to ionize, which theoretically makes it difficult for an arc to form. However, electricity can still arc in a vacuum under certain conditions, such as when high voltages are involved or when the electrodes are extremely close together.
I was thinking neon lights. I mean that’s basically an arc, just spread out. I think I heard that there’s a glow in vacuum too, just not as nice as with neon.
Well, a quick search turned up this: Vacuum Arc
However, like the above comment, it seems to refer to freeing electrons from the conducts, so, IMHO, you no longer have a vacuum.
If you could somehow maintain a perfect vacuum; I wonder how this concept Virtual particle would come into play (or if it would at all).
Oh hey, I design those. Though I design them so that there’s an incredibly low risk they do that.
Boorring, we want sparks ✨️
…and DEATH
I’ll see what I can fit into my next design
🫶
Now playing Electric Six - High Voltage
Edit: all credit due to Dasus@lemmy.world
High frequency! It Mega hurtz!
Low frequency! It kill a hurtz!
Ultra high frequency! It giga hurtz!
Pretty much any high voltage high frequency thing really hurtz. It’ll kill you at different rates but it’ll hurt the entire time.
Still the path of least resistance
Or is it the path of most convenience? 🤷♀️
Sounds the same to me
Looks like a mad scientist cackling a maniacal laugh.
It’s like one of those lichtenburg patterns, except in air.
Low voltage: “Oh no, there is a tiny spot of corrosion on the contact surface, I think I need to lie down…”
High voltage: (rips line of coke) “I’M GONNA MAKE MY OWN WIRES WITH BLACKJACK AND HOOKERS!”
In fact, forget the blackjack!
This is particularly applicable around downed power cables. Do NOT approach. You don’t need to touch it to become the wire.
For example: in LA right now
Especially dangerous if it’s a high voltage wire. Even standing close you can become the least resistant path to earth.
dO nOT toUch the DoWn wIres uuuum I have MY RIGHTS to turn myself into a gas station hotdogs thankyouverymuch
You have to keep in mind that the resistance from one foot to your other is going to be less than dry earth between your strides. This means if you are walking toward a downed power line, you may inadvertently walk within its path to its ground and the voltage could actually travel through you.
Why is this not knowledge taught in school?
It is the first time i hear about it and i have never thought of it, yet it makes total sense and could make the difference between life and death in a storm damaged area.
Because magic™ is cool
Well, we did learn exactly that in school and had a practical demonstration at a museum.
But on a different continent.
Yeah this should be up there with “stop, drop, and roll”
That’s so interesting. Thanks!
The safest way to do it is to get someone else to touch it first.
For downed, you mean just a power cable that’s down on the ground but otherwise intact, or he’s only dangerous when cut?
Any cable that’s not where it’s supposed to be, just stay away 👌 Even if it isn’t visibly cut there could be a short somewhere
mhh, you have a point.
Everything is wire if the voltage is high enough
iS iT Up tO cOde??? <— stupidass city council 🙄
Everything is a wire if the voltage is high enough.
Every machine is a smoke machine if you use it wrong enough.
Oi! As an engineer I worked damn hard to trap that magic smoke in the machine only for you to let it out and try perfectly good components. Treat your machines with respect, they’re getting smarter by the day and they’re forgetting less and less!
I was interviewed for a position where lady handed me a pen and asked if it was a conductor.
I replied: "if the voltage is high enough, yea. She scoffed. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job.
Honestly I think you gave the experienced adult answer to what was a high school or even middle school science question.
that just sounds like a weird interview.
“you’re qualified for this position if, and only if, you can answer a useless question with only a rudimentary understanding of the subject and no critical thought”
if true, you dodged a bullet
Assuming that you can draw a triangle from any 3 lines, draw a triangle from lines of length 1, 2 and 3
Isn’t that impossible, because let’s say you use 3 as the base, the only way 1 and 2 could connect is if they were at 0 angle.
-Sun Tzu
The dog breed?
I went to a zoo the other day. Only had one animal, which was a dog. It was a shit zoo.
Not dog!
Is pAnDa!
In the least, it had 3 types of shit:
- dog shit
- human shit
- bullshit
Does better as a shit zoo for sure
Every problem is a nail if you hammer it hard enough.
“Danger! Danger! High voltage.
When we touch, when we kiss”
“Fire at the disco; fire at the, Taco Bell!”
“Fire at the disco; fire at the, Gates of Hell!”
Don’t you wanna know why we keep startin’ fires
😚🥰⚡️💀
Dammit! I just got this song outta my head
“it’s current not voltage that kills you”
High voltage: “Por que no los dos?”
High voltage: “hey bestie, how would you like a ✨️new and improved ✨️ nervous system?”
I always thought that was a dumb saying because voltage is specifically what allows there to be a lethal current.
Its the “power” that kills you. Power depends on you as well as voltage.(Your resistance determine the current and time period of current flow also matters)
In static electric fields, sure. But the real world has rapidly changing electric fields, and mapping concepts like voltage or resistance to a time dimension starts to require imaginary numbers (and the complex analogue to resistance goes by a different name of impedance). And once you’re modeling electricity through those concepts, you can have high current in a particular moment in time where the voltage might not be high. Or where the implied voltage is very high but was actually more of an effect than a cause.
In other words, if you’re simply talking about “resistance,” you’re already in the wrong domain to be analyzing electrical safety properly.
I think people just don’t understand ohm’s law. They seem to think voltage and current are unrelated to each other.
I suppose it’s half right. Obviously OHMs law is the triangle.
So you get a high voltage, running through a high resistance, it won’t kill you. The problem is people interpret it in a way that seems to think raising the voltage without raising the resistance is just fine.
It’s kinda hard to raise your body’s resistance a ton outside of not making good contact (e.g. wearing rubber boots/gloves). Things like your skin being moist lower resistance, but I’m not sure it’s really that much of a safety factor when dealing with high voltage.
I think the general gist is… not as much your body’s resistance as the circuit as a whole. IE a high voltage power source traveling through a high resistance circuit, vs touching the high voltage source directly.
It’s about the full path the electricity takes (not counting any portion that you may be cutting out if you are giving it a faster path to ground allowing it to bypass some resistance), rather than just the voltage of the source.
That’s the point that’s trying to be made in that statement, the voltage is indeed a critical part of the equasion. Just not the sole portion of importance.
Voltage and current are related, of course, but Ohm’s law is just a simplification of circuit theory for static circuits, and the version most are taught early on assume zero inductance and zero capacitance in the circuit. Drop in an alternating current, some capacitors and inductors, and you’ve got yourself a more complex situation, literally, with the scalar real number representing resistance replaced with the complex number representing impedance.
And when you have time variance that isn’t a simple sinusoidal wave of electric potential coming from a source, even the definition of the word “voltage” starts requiring vector calculus to even be a coherent definition.
So when I take a simple battery of DC cells to create a low voltage power source, I can still induce current using some transformers and inductors (which store energy in magnetic field) and abruptly breaking open the circuit so that the current still arcs across high resistance air. That’s the basic principle of how a spark plug works. In those cases, you’re creating immense voltages for a tiny amount of time, but there’s never any real risk of significant current being pushed through any part of a person’s body. And as soon as you draw off some of the current, the voltage immediately drops as you deplete the stored energy wherever it is in the system.
And anything designed to deliver an electric shock to a person (or animal) tends to be high voltage, low current. Tasers, electric fences, etc.
So it’s current that matters for safety. A high voltage doesn’t always induce a high current. And current can cause problems even at relatively low voltages.
Hence the signs saying “DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE”
It’s a very dumb saying. If you don’t have the volts you won’t get the amps to kill you that’s ohms law.
However, there are plenty of harmless high voltage scenarios as well. Situations with high voltage, but no power.
So really you need both.
10kV static discharge and 5kA @ 1mV would like a word.
To be precise, it’s the high amount of heat, electrolysis and other chemical reactions that kill you.
If you were a prefect conductor, you wouldn’t have a problem.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal…
Wow, what’s that from? It’s a great speech.
Reminds me of one of the cylon speeches in battlestar galactica
sadly, I never was good in music class and my sense of rhythm is bad
Guess you better stay away from it then
When you cast Chain Lightning at nothing.
