At school I've always learned that you can view Current and Voltage like this:
The current is the flow of charge per second and the Voltage is how badly the current 'wants' to flow.
But I'm having some trouble with this view. How can we have a Voltage without a current? There is nothing to 'flow', so how can it be there? Or is it 'latent' voltage, I mean is the voltage just always there and if a current is introduced it flows?
Also, I believe you can't have current without voltage. This to me seems logical from the very definition of current. But if you have a 'charge' without a voltage, doesn't it just stay in 1 place? Can you view it like that? If you introduce a charge in a circuit without a voltage it just doesn't move?
Best Answer
What flows is not the voltage but the charge, and that flow is called current. There can be voltage without a current; for instance if you have a single charge, that charge induces a voltage in space, even if it's empty. Voltage, in the most physical way, is a scalar field that determines the potential energy per unit charge at every point in space.
Now, you can't have currents without voltages because if there's a current there's a charge moving, and every charge produces a voltage, but you can have currents without voltage differences in space. For example, if you have a charged sphere, and you make it rotate, the charge will be on the surface and by rotating the sphere you will have a current on the surface, but the voltage is the same at every point of the surface. Also magnetization of materials can induce currents by the same way.
That's true, it won't move, unless you have some changing magnetic field that may introduce "voltage differences" between the same point, making $\nabla\times E\not =0$, although that wouldn't be electrostatic voltage the way you're seeing it.