Quote Originally Posted by vt_maverick View Post
Not sure I understand... you take issue with the statement but it seems like your analogy is the same as what I wrote? I thought potential difference was what makes electricity (water) move from positive (higher pressure) to negative (lower pressure). Without the difference in charge/pressure, nothing would ever happen.
Once again, water pressure doesn't kill anyone, neither does voltage. A tazer operates at thousands of volts, but does not cause death, the magnitude of current it is capable of supplying is VERY low. A 120 volt outlet in your house can provide a high enough sustainable current to cause death. Another analogy would be like saying a tall cliff kills people. No, its the fall and subsequent landing that kills people. Guns don't kill people, its the bullet that kills you and so on. So I apologize, its a semantics things, but at our school we are big on technicalities
Now in all fairness, you can't have a high enough current to kill without sufficient voltage, which can be as low as 30 volts. (for those that don't know, current is the movement of charged particles in a specific direction, be it electrons or ions depends on the medium involved, voltage or potential is the force that causes them to move)
But we have a hard time at work getting students to stop saying the "flow" of voltage, or "voltage flowing".