How Electricity Actually Works

I made a video about a gigantic circuit with light second long wires that connect up to a light bulb which is just one meter away from the battery and switch and I asked you after I close the switch how long will it take for us to get light from that light bulb and my answer was one over C seconds and his answer is wrong we would be able to communicate faster than the speed of light that violates causality and Common Sense this is actually a bit misleading misleading misleading in a way extremely unconvinced naughty Mr veritasium has stood on a right Hornet's Nest clearly I did not do a good job of explaining what was really going on in the last video so I want to clear up any confusion that I created so behind me we have a scaled down model of this circuit it is only 10 meters in length on either side obviously that's a lot shorter than one light second but for the first 30 nanoseconds this model should be identical to the big circuit and Caltech has very fast Scopes so we'll be able to see what's going on in this time I got a ton of help on this from Richard Abbott who works on ligo the gravitational wave detector over here we are going to put a little resistor which is going to be the stand-in for our light bulb and we're going to measure it with a scope and see essentially what is the time delay between applying a pulse on the other side basically flicking the switch for us to get a voltage across our resistor and the magnitude of that voltage is really important a lot of people thought it would be negligible the amount of energy supplied by this is so minuscule a tiny tiny effect right the amount of power you're getting to the lamp over here it's naffle immense the light turns on at any current level immediately that is not what I meant well actually with that assumption Derek's answer is wrong the light never turns off no matter the state of the switch some electrons will jump the Gap and result in an extremely small continuous leakage current let me be clear about what I am claiming okay it is my claim that we will see voltage and current through ...