I'm genuinely curious how you'd do that... I can touch both battery terminals with my hands and feel nothing. Even if my hands are damp, nothing happens. My battery is capable of outputting over 700amps.
People have latched on to the mantra that it’s not the volts that kill you, it’s the amps, but they never seem to remember that you need a certain voltage to get those amps in the first place.
Exactly. And also the mantra "electricity takes the path of least resistance". While that is true, some people seem to interpret it as "electricity only takes the path of least resistance" which is very wrong. Electricity takes all paths!
If electricity takes all paths, then whats the point of the mantra? It includes the highest and least resistance, and everything in between. The mantra is almost deliberately meant to mislead?
It's technically correct, but the path of least resistance is the path of least resistance at the instant of measurement. Voltage and current are abstractions that represent the aggregate motion of charge carriers in a medium. Like charge carriers repel each other. At any instant, an individual charge carrier will take the path of least resistance. Calculus is required to model the current in a non-trivial system. It frequently leads to counter-intuitive results.
A better mantra would be: electricity takes all paths in inverse proportion to their resistance.
So with a single low resistance path, give or take, all the electricity will go that way. But with two paths of equal resistance, half the electricity will go each way.
> If electricity takes all paths, then whats the point of the mantra? It includes the highest and least resistance, and everything in between. The mantra is almost deliberately meant to mislead?
Maybe mantra wasn't the right word, Wikipedia calls it a heuristic. Regardless, I agree it is very misleading and I would never say anything like that when teaching or explaining electricity. Why does it keep getting repeated? Who knows. Inertia of the masses without a much understanding of electricity would be my guess...
Most of the power goes along the path of least resistance. It's an oversimplification, but you'll make much more dangerous mistakes if you let intuition lead you into assuming a pretty spread-out flow.
Well, to be fair he said he could. Yes, it would be possible using a boost converter to jump the voltage, you can certainly draw enough current from an auto battery. But without using external components the only way a car battery would kill you is by creating a spark and igniting hydrogen that the battery produced.
