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I think there’s a very physical but also intuitive way of thinking about this which eliminates all of the confusion (even with current conventions)

Forget about voltage and let me introduce potential Think about that as a landscape, its height changes and can be mapped in a height map. It corresponds to the „arbitrary energy level“ a particle on which a force may act. Imagine a ball on a curved hill: when ignoring friction and elasticity, the ball has contact with the plane at a singular point and will begin to roll down the hill. That’s what electrons do in a electric field (they rise to the top actually but you may think about current as „virtual“ positive particles which engineers do all the time. The „sea level“ is usually defined as 0V (the potential is also measured in volts)

Now the concept of voltage becomes nothing more than a height difference. In my opinion this beautifully explains concepts like Kirchhoffs voltage law: walk a circle on earths surface and measure your net height change… it’s always 0.

So to finally ( :D ) answer your question: a negative voltage is a negative height change

Also current conventions become less confusing, because there is something all scientists and engineers can agree on: a voltage source creates a hill and a valley in its electric potential, the hill is + and the valley -, engineers think about current as virtual positive charge which will move to -, scientists will think about it as electrons moving from - to +.

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akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

walk a circle on earths surface and measure your net height change… it’s always 0.

If you aren’t already, you should become a teacher 🤣🩷 Thanks!!!

May I just ask, what “virtual” means here? Non native speaker. 🙏

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- dextro@feddit.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  You’re welcome, I’m glad that this explanation made sense.
  
  They are like places we’re electrons could be, you could also call them „electron holes“. If an electron flows through a conductor, it kicks of other electrons bound to atoms taking their place, which then become free electrons, it’s like a chain reaction without the amplification thing
  
  You could say electrons flow from left to right but you could also say that holes flow from right to left, most components like resistors don’t care.
  
  But semiconductors like diodes do, they’ll heat up very quickly.
  
  For most household appliances this is completely irrelevant because the sine potential (and the current flow it causes) change directions every (depending on where you live) 10ms. Yes your phone is semiconductor based but your phone charger rectifies that into a DC voltage with defined polarity
  
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chaospatterns@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Often times we use earth ground as the source of 0V. Can you end up with differences in potential on different “earth grounds”?

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- dextro@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Safety disclaimer: this is a thought experiment, some actions which I describe are dangerous in reality, do not experiment with electricity if you’re unsure that you know what you’re doing.
  
  Take the words earth and ground literally, it’s really a thick metal rod which gets hammered into the ground when a house gets built.
  
  A voltage source like a battery or a generator creates a difference in electric potential between its poles (by separating charge).
  
  Think of hills and valleys separated by a solid wall on isolated islands floating in the sky for some reason… 😅 The islands are of arbitrary height and free floating, but their height difference is fixed. On each of them you could do the ball on a hill experiment and it would yield the same result.
  
  You can connect the hills and valleys of each island by attaching a highway with its own wall. This is the equivalent of connecting the poles via a resistor (lower electric resistance means more and bigger holes in the wall, hills/valleys will deplete faster).
  
  You could also connect these islands in a way so that the valley of one and hill of the other touch. If you use low resistance wires there is nothing stopping electrons to freely flow from one island to another, whatever height difference there initially was between the valley and hill of the two islands, instantly drops and the islands get pulled together. But no electrons actually flow (no height difference is driving them), no hill and valley of any individual island gets depleted, no energy transferred - that’s essentially what chaining 9V batteries to yield multiples of 9V is.
  
  If you ground one pole of a generator, you pull the island toward the earths surface, which in itself can be considered a flat, but practically infinite valley/hill. Earth acts as a kind of mass storage for electrons not changing its height much when letting charged particles flow into it or vice versa.
  
  So if you had two grounded generators:
  
  one with 200V height difference, grounded but using a highway with a wall with few holes in it (poor ground connection)
  
  one with 100V with a highway with a wall with few small holes As long as nothing is depleting these islands, their valley will be fixed at ground level.
  
  If you were to connect the hill of the 200V generator to the valley of the 100V generator, the valley and hill of the 200V generator would be directly connected by the ground resistor (and its own ground resistor but that can be neglected in this example), pulling the ground pin of the 100V generator to 200V - and that’s the answer to your question. In theory every grounding point isn’t actually a grounding point, but we do our best to keep resistance as low as possible so that we can safely touch metal objects in our houses.
  
  Oh and „instant depletion transferring energy“ essentially means short circuiting a voltage source, so do not experiment with this, even if it’s low voltage like 9V batteries, they can start a fire too and in practice there are also chemical hazards. In the generator example a fuse would blow if there was one, stopping the depletion and preventing a fire or a molten generator.
  
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