# Electronic – How does a NAND gate work? (Very basic question)

circuit analysislogic-gates

I'll preface this question by saying that I am a software developer just starting to learn the basics of electronics, so it's very likely I'm missing some fundamental intuition here.

Below is a mechanical NAND gate with two switches. I think it's supposed to be obvious that when the switches are closed, the output Q is 0 rather than 1. I don't see why this is.

I see that when the two switches are closed, there is a path from V+ to ground, and that current will flow to ground. But there's also a path from V+ to Q, so won't some current still flow to the output, putting it in a 1 state?

The intuition I'm using (which may be totally wrong) is this:

• Current acts like water gushing from V+ down all available paths.
• At a junction, current will flow through both paths in an amount inversely proportional to resistance. In this case, both paths have no additional resistance so they should split the current equally.
• The boolean equivalent of a 1 is that current is flowing through a point.

Please help me understand what I'm missing! And if you can point me to a book or online resource explaining these fundamentals, that would be very helpful. I've tried looking at a lot of "circuit tutorial" content on Google, but surprisingly haven't been able to resolve my confusion here.