Timeline for Birds on a wire (again) - how is it that birds feel no current? They are just making a parallel circuit, no?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 29, 2020 at 20:19 | comment | added | Prof. Legolasov | Don't tell NASA, we don't want them to decimate the bird population to make use of their feet for that space tech! | |
| Mar 29, 2020 at 12:41 | comment | added | Sophie Swett | "Thus, it's useless to apply concepts of physics when the current just doesn't pass through" – Not at all. The laws of electricity apply perfectly well to a bird which is a perfect insulator. In particular, Ohm's law tells you that if the resistance is infinite and the voltage is finite, then the current is zero. | |
| Mar 27, 2020 at 20:39 | comment | added | Peter - Reinstate Monica | @Nij "Nonsense" is a strong word. If the birdie's feet and legs conducted as well as the wire it's perched on, they would brotherly share the current and 500 Amps would flow through it. That could cause an atrial fibrillation. (I at first thought that birdie would evaporate, but that's of course not the case any more for a well-conducting bird than for a well-conducting wire: Not much energy is lost in transition.) | |
| Mar 27, 2020 at 15:04 | comment | added | maxathousand | I found most of that quoted section at projectbeak.org/adaptations/feet.htm but the claim after the ellipsis seems to have been added by the answerer. | |
| Mar 27, 2020 at 13:47 | comment | added | Nuclear Hoagie | A person could grab the wire the same way and be completely unharmed. The voltage drop on such a short length of highly conductive wire is only about 1mV. Couple that with a human being's resistance of 1000 ohm (if they're sopping wet), they'd feel a current of 0.001 mA, which is well down in the range of "imperceptible" on the chart at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_injury. Even spreading your arms as wide as possible (~70x the voltage drop), you might feel a slight tingle. Who or what grabs the wire is rather irrelevant - it can be a bird, a squirrel, or a person, all are safe. | |
| Mar 27, 2020 at 1:31 | comment | added | Mark | Anything conducts electricity if you throw enough volts at it. | |
| Mar 27, 2020 at 0:36 | comment | added | David Waterworth | Perfect insulators are very rare, there's probably some truth in this though. A birds claws may have very high electrical resistance compared to say a human foot. The current flow through them would then be proportionally lower for the same voltage. Plus an electrical current hand-to-hand is worse than foot-to-foot due to the current path and the location of our heart. I agree though the quote is misleading | |
| Mar 27, 2020 at 0:25 | review | Low quality answers | |||
| Mar 27, 2020 at 5:45 | |||||
| Mar 27, 2020 at 0:23 | comment | added | Nij | This is nonsense. The bird's feet do conduct electricity, and the material in quoteblocks either needs a very strong citation, or should not be in quotes. | |
| Mar 26, 2020 at 14:08 | comment | added | JMac | Where does that quote even come from? It seems quite incorrect. I'm pretty darn sure if a bird put its two legs on two different wires at different voltage, current would flow through it, the resistance wouldn't stop the current completely. | |
| Mar 26, 2020 at 13:38 | history | answered | neel g | CC BY-SA 4.0 |