I’ve seen descirptions of batteries, and how they kinda push electrons through wires to the other side, but how does that actually work? What’s the mechanism that makes them actually move?
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You charge up a battery by applying a voltage which creates ions and free electrons. Those are kept separate in the battery. Now you’ve got one part of the battery that contains excess electrons and is hence negatively charged. The other part of the battery contains positively charged ions and is hence positively charged.
Now you’ve got a voltage differential! In other words, you’ve created an electric field. An electric field is a force that pushes/pulls charged particles, depending upon their polarity.
The wires you use have a lot of loosely bound electrons that are free to move around. And they do all the time due to their thermal energy, but that motion is random and hence doesn’t make an electrical current.
If you provide an electric field (voltage) via the battery, those electrons still jiggle around due to their thermal energy, but they also drift in the direction of the positive battery terminal. They “drift” pretty darned fast, about 1/3 of the speed of light. That is an electrical current.
When those electrons get to the positive terminal of the battery, they de-ionize those positive ions. So the battery starts to “run down”.
Now you might ask, “Why do charged particles feel a force when put in an electric field?” and that would be an excellent question. If you come up with an excellent answer, start preparing for your Nobel Prize speech. Because the answer currently is “Because that’s the way this universe works.” You can get longer, more complex answers, but that’s what they boil down to.
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