I'm trying to understand when you can say a circuit is being "shorted".
Obviously you are creating a short circuit when you hook up the two ends of a battery with a wire. But the wire does offer some resistance, even though its extremely little.
What if you hook up the two ends of the battery with a 1 ohm resistor? Is it still being shorted?
So where is the line drawn between shorting and well, not shorting?
What is actually happening to the electrons in both cases?
Thanks!
Best Answer
The name "Short Circuit" comes from an unintentional path for the electrons which is "shorter" than that we intend.
Crudely speaking, the electrons will follow the path of least resistance. Normally we control that flow through our circuit using the components, such as resistors, capacitors, transistors, etc. When an unintentional route between two points is created that is of a lower resistance (thus "shorter") than we want, that is where the electrons will prefer to go. This is what we term a "short circuit".
On an electron level it is no different to any other part of the circuit, but from our point of view it is a bad thing that causes things to happen that we didn't want.