Comment

No, there is absolutely current flowing when you touch both terminals, it’s just an incredibly tiny amount. You can do the math yourself and see, it’s a basic application of Ohms law. The formula is (I=V/R).

source

Sort:hotnew top

Yondoza@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Shorts are unintended low impedance paths.

it’s just an incredibly tiny amount Indicates you are not describing a short.

Sure, there is technically current flowing, but it is small enough to be considered an open circuit for engineering purposes. There is leakage current for every insulator, we don’t call it a short.

source
- Warl0k3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  (I’m sorry I hate doing these, but I’m tired and I had to stab my partner with a microohmeter to verify the numbers and now she’s real horny so you get the low effort version)
  
  but it is small enough to be considered an open circuit for engineering purposes.
  
  The current flowing when you complete the circuit with with your hand is about 0.2 miliamps (measured at ~47,000Ω resistance so I rounded to 50k). If any engineer is considering that an open circuit ~~they should be driven through the streets in a waymo~~ I would very much like to see the application in which they consider that an open circuit because none is springing to mind (outside of clear outliers like some of the really weird switches used in high voltage electronics which I can’t even remember the names of).
  
  Shorts are unintended low impedance paths.
  
  That is one type of short, yes, however if we look at the formal definition from wikipedia:
  
  A short circuit is an abnormal connection between two nodes of an electric circuit intended to be at different voltages. This results in a current limited only by the Thévenin equivalent resistance of the rest of the network which can cause circuit damage, overheating, fire or explosion.
  
  We can see that it is not actually a requirement to have a circuit with zero impedance; it’s just a common form a short takes. This makes sense of course: a short across a signal wire is obviously not going to dump the full potential of an entire system, only that portion that provides current to the shorting circuit. In the case of a car battery, the leakage current is the part of the absurdly low current circuit (something like 30 picoamps) which you are shorting when you make contact with the terminals.
  
  However at the risk of still being right, let me say that this is… an incredibly dumb semantic argument to be having. Yes, technically, you are shorting the battery. In a more formal setting I probably wouldn’t have phrased it like that in an effort to stave off the chance of a tedious argument like we’re having right now; however this is a shitpost community so I figured brevity instead of defensive technical inaccuracy was the ideal course of action.
  
  Clearly, that was the wrong call.
  
  source
sem@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Cool, til. I guess it is semantic then wether a short is low-resistance or any connection.

Iirc, even the air has a resistance value, so that would imply that all batteries are shorted at all times which doesn’t seem useful for the English language.

source
- Warl0k3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  I suppose an argument could be made that a battery simply sitting around is only connected to one circuit (itself thru the air) and thus there’s not an “unintended” one it’s also connected to - but really, my unstated point this whole time is that this is not a usefully rigorously defined term. The definition on wikipedia is as close as we’ll get, and it’s extremely broad by it’s nature.
  
  source