If something has 1V and 1000 amps isn’t it impossible for it to penetrate the body so it won’t kill you from the electricity flowing into you? Like say even if the amps were 1 million would it still be impossible for it to kill you through the electricity flowing into you?
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It needs to have enough energy to overcome your body’s resistance. A bullet won’t kill you if you try pushing it into your chest with your hand, but it will if pushed out of a gun.
Amps are the width of a highway and volts are the number of cars on the highway. If the highway is 1,000,000 feet wide but there is only 1 car on it, you aren’t in much danger. Conversely, if the highway is only 1 foot wide but there are 1,000,000 cars per second passing through it, it probably isn’t very dangerous but probably much more potential for danger than the other example.
As a metaphor: the 1000 amp at 1v is like being in a swimming pool surrounded by water. The water pressure isn’t going to do much to get through your skin.
On the other hand, 1000v at 1amp would be like a water cutter that is used to slice steel plates. Definitely going through your skin and causing damage.
Current = Voltage / Resistance. Given a rough resistance value of 1000 ohms for a human body, a 1 volt source would only supply 1 milliamp to the body. If you push a constant current of 1000 amps through the body it would generate a 1 kilovolt differential. You can’t force a specific current and voltage.
Voltage is the electrical pressure (Electro motive force, EMF). Amperage is the flow level- current.
Look up some videos explaining Ohm’s law. It’s a simple equation
Current (amps) is going to be the result of the voltage divided by resistance. At 1v you have to present a very very low resistance to flow that much current. Voltage is a force which can exist with no current flow. You can’t push more current than you have force to do so.
>If something has 1V and 1000 amps
Keep in mind that a “thing having a voltage and an amperage” is not a useful way of thinking about it to begin with. A voltage is a potential difference between two points. The amperage is a measurement for moving – and only moving – charges. No electric flow = 0 Ampere. So a voltage is not a static quality of just one thing and an amperage is not a static quality at all.
>isn’t it impossible for it to penetrate the body so it won’t kill you from the electricity flowing into you? Like say even if the amps were 1 million would it still be impossible for it to kill you through the electricity flowing into you?
Everything beyond that is just Ohm’s law. If there’s a potential difference between two points and you put a resistance (like… a human body) between those points then the resulting electric flow is simply determined by that voltage and the resistance.
And that flow will only amount to “1000 Ampere” if the voltage is high enough or the resistance small enough.
If I’m interpreting what you’re saying correctly, then yes, you are right.
What matters for harm to a person is how much current goes through their body. Just because a conductor has a high current load on it doesn’t mean that someone touching it will automatically be harmed, because there has to be a voltage across the person’s body to induce a current through them.
So yes, as long as the voltage across one’s body is low enough not to induce a harmful amount of current through the body, it doesn’t really matter at all how much current is flowing through the source of said voltage.
Put differently, if you touched a big ol theoretical cable with both hands that had a billion amps going through it, but zero volts between your hands, the current flow through your body would be… zero amps, and you wouldn’t even notice a thing, much less be harmed.
This is the same reason birds can perch on electrical wires- the voltage of the wire might be high relative to ground, but the voltage difference between the bird’s feet is basically zero, and so an insignificant amount of current flows through the bird.
ETA: I used to impress seasonal employees at a former workplace of mine by testing whether an electric bear fence was on by touching it with my bare finger. Since I always wore rubber boots in that job, I was well insulated from ground and never got more than an aggressive static-feeling tingle, because the voltage difference between the fence and ground didn’t apply; it was just charging me up like a capacitor, not actually conducting to ground through me. Then one fine day I was wearing sandals and no socks and my toe touched an aluminum ramp sitting on the ground at the same time I touched the bear fence with my hand, and this time a lesson about being casual around electricity in the real world based on theory was learned…
Current (amps) is a function of voltage and resistance. A power source won’t just “have a certain number of amps”, it’ll have a maximum amount of current it can supply at a given voltage. So even if a power supply has a maximum current of 1000 amps, it won’t matter if it’s set to 1 volt across dry skin. There’s simply too much resistance to ever hope to reach 1000 amps.
Current is what happens once the voltage is applied to a resistor. If the current was water, voltage is the pressure off the tap and resistance is the thickness of a hose.
Humans are a thin hose, we are high resistors. Therefore 1V cannot make any detectable current through us – and this current kills you. mA can kill a person. But for this, you need more voltage.
Now, if 1V would make 1000A somewhere this would mean that it is flowing through a very low resistance. In analogy this would be like a river stream going slowly. This cannot hurt anyone unless for example all this current is suddenly forced to stop or slow down (reduce). I.e. you take the 1000A 1V cable with two hands and split it. Then, it has the inertia and it will almost instantly create such an electromagnetic field, which will raise the voltage across human to a way higher value than 1V, to try to continue to push this 1000A through whatever, until it stops. Like suddenly stopping a river.
Yes. Amperage is just the amount of electricity and voltage is like a pressure difference that can overcome resistance which is a bit like a barrier on this case. Overcoming the resistance leads to current flow and that is what can damage the body.
Also, ampere is a unit of charge flow over time, so it is 0 when there’s no current. The rating you see on equipment is meant to describe the maximum amount of current it can provide to a circuit. This is why batteries have their capacities in ampere-hour(basically how many hours it would take to discharge at 1A), which is just coulombs.
A lot of people don’t understand this. It isn’t current or voltage that kills you, it’s energy over time (power). Power is voltage times current. 1V at 1000 amps is 1000 watts and you are dead.
However, the human body has a decently high resistance so 1V isn’t likely enough voltage to conduct any current at all through your body so you’d have 1V and 0 amps.
A rough analogy of electric power would be a projectile, where the voltage is the mass, the current is the speed, and you have body armour as resistance. A huge projectile moving slowly can still kill you if it’s big enough. Similarly a tiny projectile will also kill you if it’s fast enough.
You cannot just arbitrarily spit out numbers for V, I and R and expect reality to agree with it.
V=IR is a fundamental law of our universe. Let that really sink in.
You can’t control all of them. You can control 2 of them, and then the other 1 will follow this equation. If you attempt to force it not to, you will likely cause a fire because it will do what ever is required to abide by V=IR. No matter what you attempt, V=IR occurs. It is a fundamental law of electricity.
The human body has a resistance, you can’t really change it. It is what it is. You apply a voltage to us, an amperage will occur. You apply an amperage to us, you will create a voltage. You can’t do both. If you try, you will cause a fire somewhere in some device as it is being force to dump energy to comply with V=IR.
Yes, if the voltage is too low, it won’t be able to do anything, no matter how much power it is able to push. That is if you’re asking about power source rated at 1V and MAX 1000A.
However, low voltage high current power sources can still be dangerous in that if you short circuit them by accident, the high current WILL melt things and set stuff on fire. You can lookup Styropyro’s video with 100 lead batteries in parallel. The voltage was still just 12, safe to touch. But the short circuit experiments were very dangerous.
Voltage and current are instantaneous metrics for an electrical load. Under simple/ideal circumstances, changing the properties of the load (like putting a human body in the middle) will instantly change the voltage and current to something quite different. If you want to add “momentum” to the voltage, you need capacitance (capacitors). If you want to add “momentum” to the current, you need inductance (inductors).
A Nurf gun that can blast 10s of darts per min won’t hurt you much. That’s current.
A rifle firing a supersonic bullet would kill you. That’s volts.