Vinny Tries to Understand Batteries - Periscope

Vinny is having trouble understanding why electrons need complete circuits to flow continuously. Enjoy.

From youtube channel, Giant Bomb Unarchived, which features candid Giant Bomb videos not found on the website.

I saw Vinny talking about this on twitter but I didn't know there was a periscope to go with it. Thanks for posting it.

This video is magic.

Yup. This is the first step towards our brilliant, VinnCo powered future. I bought one of the shirts so that's basically like being an investor, right?

BTW seems like @vinny would learn a lot from building a galvanic cell out of a lemon or something. Since he seems to be thinking that the anode / cathode are in themselves special, but actually they're only an anode / cathode when they're part of a complete cell. All the talk about potential isn't making sense because of this misconception I think.

For everybody's information, this was found on the Giant Bomb Unarchived youtube channel. It seems to have a whole bunch of candid Giant Bomb videos that were, as titled, unarchived on the site. I just found it today, actually.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJuXmaHOPVweElJSIsidWkQ

Id listen to a science podcast with Vinny and Austin. If they can skype Brad in, that will be great. If you like chaos, have Dan in.

@forteexe21: Also, having Rorie on the science podcast, since he was a physics major for a bit?

Vinny is awesome.

@bisonhero: Thatll be great but hes often busy. Havent had a box office bomb for a long while.

I'm confused about what Vinny expects to happen when he connects those two batteries together the way he sketched it out. Seems like there's a bit of a misconception about exactly what voltage is and what causes the electrons to actually flow when they're in a complete circuit as opposed to the incomplete circuit he sketched out. His use of the term "short circuit" there is incorrect as there is no circuit at all.

If you think about it in terms of Ohm's Law, I = V / R, where I is current, V is voltage, and R is a given resistance of the conductor between them, Vinny is describing a situation where R is essentially infinite (i.e. there's no conductor whatsoever completing the circuit). So no matter how much potential there is in a single cell, the current is going to be 0 in that situation. Connected batteries in series just increases the voltage between the outermost nodes, but they still need a complete circuit in order for the electrons to flow.

As an engineer who LOVES analogies, I feel like I could have explained this to Vinny in 5 minutes.

@chaser324: It seems Vinny likes a hands-on approach to learning something, and this whole video seems like him wanting to just mess with it himself because if all the VinnCo ideas have taught me anything, it's like Vinny wants to fiddle around with something enough that he finds some edge case where the theory doesn't apply. Also he just kinda needs to see it to believe it.

Also, yeah, I'm used to people using "short circuit" to refer to a whole range of electrical problems when it means one very specific thing (namely, creating a resistanceless path/shortcut in a complete circuit, causing the current to completely avoid another path with components on it).

Did this come about out of genuine curiosity, or was it brought on by something?

Whoever finds out how to make a better battery will rule the world, vinny can be that person. Asking questions like this is how he gets there.

@chaser324: I got the impression that Vinny had something like the following mental picture:

"Electrons flow from the negative end of a battery, where the electrons live, to the positive end, where there's a mass of "stuff" to absorb them. That's why when you complete a circuit by connecting a wire from a battery's negative end to its positive, the electrons flow around. But what if you run a wire from the negative end of one battery to the positive end of another battery? Can I get the electrons from the negative end of battery A to get absorbed by the "stuff" in the positive end of battery B, and have current flow through the wire that way?"

The answer is "no" - I think because the electrons arriving in the battery's positive end are essentially driving a chemical reaction in the battery, and that reaction depends on ions being able to move between the two electrodes through the electrolye. The flow of electrons from the negative electrode to the positive one has to be balanced by the flow of positive ions through the electrolyte to the positive electrode, or the flow of negative ions to the negative end. The important bit is, if you didn't have this flow of ions you'd get a negative charge building up as you sent more and more electrons to the positive end of the battery, so they'd stop flowing. That's why you don't get current flow when you connect the ends of two differnet batteries together - in battery B you'd have electrons piling up at the positive electrode, but no corresponding electrons would have been taken away form that battery's negative electrode, so ions wouldn't have any reason to flow there and the chemical magic wouldn't happen.

(I'm doing a physics degree, so I feel I ought to know, but most of this is half-remembered secondary school chemistry, so it may be completley wrong...)

@immortal_guy: You cannot connect one isolated circuits + to another isolated circuits - becouse that + and that - wouldnt actually be + and - relative to each other and hence no voltage. A battery is one isolated circuit.