Episode: 1717
Title: HPR1717: Visualizing electricity
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1717/hpr1717.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 08:09:28

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This is HPR episode 1,717 entitled Visualizing Electricity.
It is hosted by first-time host-cuck and is about 11 minutes long.
The summary is, trying to understand electricity.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
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Hello HPR listeners.
My nick is TCUC, you can call me TCUC or TC or Thor and today I'd like to help you
visualize what electricity is and how it works.
Electricity has two main components, voltage and current.
So to use water as an analogy or metaphor, if you might, to electricity or electrical
electrons, current basically.
You can think of voltage as pressure and current being the amount of water.
So if you look at a battery, you have a negative pole and a positive pole on the battery.
The negative pole has a larger electrical potential than the positive pole due to electrons
moving from the negative pole to the positive pole.
So comparing this to water, you have more pressure at the minus side than you have on the
plus side, which will mean that electrons or water, if you might, will be moving from
the negative side towards the positive side with the amount of pressure that you have stored
in your battery, which will be pleat.
So a regular AA battery being 1.5 volts, you have 1.5 volts of pressure or potential between
your negative pole and your positive pole.
Now if you just connect those two, you'll have a whole lot of water being, or current,
being pushed from your negative pole to your positive pole really, really fast.
And you don't want to deplete your batteries instantly, I presume.
So you're going to have to regulate the amount of current going through your circuit.
And this you can do with something called a resistor.
Now resistors, if we're using the water analogy, you could compare to like a valve, the resistor
will restrict the amount of water or current allowed to move through the valve and as a result,
the circuit as a whole, and then your battery will deplete slower.
Now to really understand the relationship between current and voltage and resistance,
there's something called Ohm's Law, which you can look up yourself, but I'd like to explain
it more visually or verbally, I guess.
So now imagine that you have two resistors in series, which means that they're connected
after each other.
So you have one resistor connected to your negative pole and then that resistor is then
connected to another resistor.
That resistor is then connected to your positive pole.
Now the current will be flowing through both of your resistors and the resistance in total
will be twice as much since you have two resistors.
Now say that both of your resistors are the exact same value.
Then the resulting pressure difference before your one valve in relation to after it will
be exactly half of your total pressure, your total pressure then being 1.5 volts, which
is the total pressure of your battery.
That will be true for both of your resistors.
And since you now, instead of having one resistor have two resistors, your current will also
be half, keep that circuit in your mind.
And if we increase the value of the first resistor, as in you take the valve and you turn
the valve down so that the aperture or the valve itself becomes even more narrow, which
means that it'll let even less water pass or even less current pass, which means that
the total current in your circuit is reduced.
Now say that valve is twice as small or half the size.
So the resistance is twice as high, say if it was at 100, now it's at 200, your second
one is still 100.
And that means that now two thirds of your total pressure will be right in front of your
first valve.
So the pressure difference between your first valve and the beginning of your second valve
will be two thirds of the total pressure and the pressure difference between your second
valve and your plus pole will then be one third of the total pressure.
And your current will also be reduced by one third.
Now as you can see by increasing the resistance of the resistor, you're increasing the
amount of pressure it is holding back and reducing the amount of total current or amount
of water you are putting through the entirety of the circuit.
Now I hope this helps you visualize the relationship between current and voltage and how resistance
impedes the current and increases the voltage at that point.
I often find myself needing to step back and just visualize how the electricity works
to be able to work out what the circuit in fact is doing at that point.
And by comparing it to water, it's easier for me at least to kind of intuitively tell
how a given component will affect a circuit as a whole and what I can expect the voltage
at that point or the current in the circuit as a whole to be given a certain change.
I'd also like to add that this is my first recording for HPR and my second recording ever
actually and I'd like to add that it's actually not that hard to just record your episode
even though I've probably used an hour on this five minute or seven minute, I don't
know exactly how far this will end up after editing long episode.
And if you're afraid of audio quality, I'd like you to know that there is a great program
called Audacity that you can record in and that has this fantastic tool for noise cancellation.
And I'll demonstrate how awesome it actually is.
This is without any noise cancellation and the noise cancellation is actually really,
really good.
So with noise cancellation, all you have to do is select a bit of noise and let Audacity
use that to remove the noise from the rest of your recording.
So just record a little bit of silence and then go to your effects menu and use the
noise deletion tool.
Is that what it's called?
The noise removal tool and that'll do the job.
That'll just make things a whole lot nicer.
So thanks again and talk to you later, hopefully.
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