MIT graduates cannot power a light bulb with a battery

Though we don't know how many of these people have any experience with electronics, one says they are a mechanical engineer, perhaps the others are chemists or economics or any number of non science majors. This is a bit disturbing, though one who said they needed another wire seems kind of like they were just not thinking outside of the box, and I think with a table more could do it. I would also bet that more could do it but weren't shown on camera.

Overall I do believe that this is a problem and more common than one would think. I recall, as a computer science undergrad, when I was doing my senior thesis (which was a low level project), that I mentioned a trouble was with pulse width modulation on the board I was using. And I was rather surprised (shocked really) how so many computer science majors (who at minimum would have taken some physics, and also a basic electronics course) did not know what basic electronics things like pulse width modulation worked, or how a servo worked, as these were things I picked up as kid for fun.

Guy who answers, "maybe" to the query, "Can you light this bulb with a battery" seems the only to actually be able to do it.

"Maybe" is the answer to almost all y/n engineering questions.

Yea pretty lame question.. given 1 wire, a battery, a bulb that has 2 terminals but both are not totally obvious—and likely designed to run substantially higher voltages thru it, and testing the bulb outside (so if the bulb lights up very slightly you might not see it) with no table or anything to set things down on feels more like a trick question than a legitimate test. A more direct question should have been, here is a lightbulb, does it have a positive and negative terminal? Ok if it does have a positive and negative terminals where are they? Does it likely matter for this type of bulb which terminal is positive or negative? If somebody answers all of that then now try connecting the bulb to a battery, but if they are not familiar with this type of bulb likely they will be a bit confused..

Yikes!

I thought it had to be a trick question. Too much simulation, not enough hands on labs with chips exploding off the breadboards because of positive being red {not black like in accounting}. 8)

Given a big enough battery, of course, for a brief amount of time the wire itself can light up. I've melted plenty of bare 14 AWG wire across some bolts screwed into a big aircraft NiCad cell when I was a kid.

I remember bringing a bulb and battery and wire to kindergarten once to show how to do that to the other kids, but I never showed because I realized how childish a thing it was and got embarrassed because everyone would laugh at me for choosing such a simple thing.. should have demonstrated it at MIT instead I guess.

There's a similar video (also from the late eighties, and I suspect from the same series of videos?) wherein Harvard seniors are queried as to why summer is warm and winter is cold. They interviewed a couple dozen people and two gave a correct answer.

As an MIT alum I have to point out that all the students interviewed are, in fact, Harvard graduates.

edit: except for the only person who actually got it to work.

How many of these had my first reaction to it: Of course not, not enough voltage.

Sounds like Hacker News readers cannot power a light bulb with a wire and a battery either.