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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Equating water to electricity is an analog that breaks down when looked too closely at.
Batteries don’t actually store electrons that’s what capacitors do. Batteries are more like pumps that exploit a chemical reaction to ‘push’ electrons to one side of them.
However when electrons aren’t being returned to the other the chemical reaction stops because there’s nothing left to push (or rather the positive charge that builds up due to lack of electrons attracts the remaining electrons more then the chemical reaction can push against).
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