| These are physical properties that can be experienced (although there is some risk) for voltage you can touch a Van de Graaff generator, for current you can touch a battery to your tongue. That's the way to understand electricity without analogies. :) Anyway, voltage is always measured between two points (one is typically called "ground" but that's not important here.) It's a difference. (A difference of what? No one knows. That's just the way it is.) Current is always measured through a single point. It's a count of the charge flowing past a point per time unit. (What is charge? No one knows. "Charge" is just a name for the mysterious something that "voltage" is a difference of...) When electricity moves it obeys a (very simple) Law called (Ohm's Law) e.g.: E = V/R
The current (E) is the Voltage divided by the Resistance.E.g. is I have a 5 Volt power supply and I put a 100 Ohm resistor across it (remember that voltage is always between two points) then 5/100 Amperes of current will flow through it. Also, If I take just the resistor and drive 0.05 Amps through it, it will develop a voltage of 5 volts, as measured from one end of the resistor to the other end. Now if that doesn't help you, remember the advice of John Von Neumann to Felix Smith: "Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them." |
I think you're being overly mysterious here. It's the number of electrons passing through the wire per second. And charge isn't the thing that voltage is a difference of; it's potential difference, as in electric potential energy. The "water in a pipe" analogy really isn't that bad; it's gravitational potential instead of electrical potential, and amount of water instead of amount of electrons.