If I have a circuit like this and measure the voltage drop across the resistor I get a value, regardless of what resistor I use:
However, if I stick a piece of wood in there instead of the resistor I get nothing. My intuition says there must be some resistance value between wood and conductor where the voltmeter switches from reading the voltage source to reading zero. Is that how this works? Is there some high resistance value where the voltmeter reads a fraction of the source voltage? Is my understanding of electronics terribly wrong?
EDIT: I suspect the answer has to do with current and the voltmeter not being an ideal, infinite resistance machine, but I can't get from there to the answer.