3) That circuit still has me a little confused... As the light bulb has the same results as a copper wire does, they both fill the capacitors to 9.3volts respectively. Why is there not more of a loss with a resistive light bulb than a 13awg copper wire you would use in house wiring? That one I do not understand. I will do the tests though to find out. If anyone can answer this please let me know.
-Dave Wing
That is actually quite a good question to ask people learning about electronics!
After all, the start state, and the end state are the same no matter what the resistance of the kink between the capacitors is.
So, why does the circuit "loose" the same amount of energy in either case? The answer is in the 4th dimension! And of course is "TIME". All that the resistance changes in this circuit is HOW LONG it takes for it to achieve equilibrium. For example, you could expend 10joules worth of energy by expending 10W of power for 1 second, or by expending 1W for 10seconds. In either case you have "lost" the same amount of energy.
Now the only difficult bit comes when you look at how resistance "looses" power, as it has a square term in the calculation. So the power in a resistance is IsquaredR (I x I x R).
So when you replace your bulb, with say 10ohms of resistance with a bit of wire with say just 1 ohm of resistance, the equilibrium point occurs 10x faster, with 10x more current average flowing. So, lets say in:
Case 1: with a 10 Ohm bulb in series, it takes 10sec for equilibrium, and 1Amp flows:
The average loss in the bulb (IxIXR) is 1 x 1 x 10 = 10 Watts, and 10watts for 10sec = 100 Joules
Case 2: with a 1 Ohm wire in series, it takes just 1 sec for equilibrium and 10 Amps flow:
The average loss in the bulb is 10 X 10 X 1 = 100 Watts, and 100 Watts for 1 second is, 100 joules
See, it's amazingly elegant how the real physical world works, to the point we don't really need to be making up psuedo science or WooWoo or whatever!!