Why doesn’t current flow when I connect the positive pole of one battery to the negative pole of another? In the moment of contact, shouldn’t the electrons that are abundant in the negative pole want to rush to the positively charged pole of the other battery until the charge in both poles equalizes?
My mental model of a battery is a water tank that has a wall through the middle, giving it two partitions. One of them is full of water, the other empty. Now you can connect a hose from one end to the other and water will flow from full to empty until the water level equalizes. But if you connected the empty side of one tank to the full side of another tank, water would still flow. Clearly my model is flawed. Can someone explain? Thank you!
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Electricity, particularly at low voltages, needs to flow in a circuit, where it goes back to the place it started. If it doesn’t have that complete circuit, it doesn’t flow.
At high voltages, it can also flow into the ground, but battery voltages are much lower than that.
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