Understanding Electricity and Circuits: What the Text Books Don't Tell You

Most of the standard physics text books that we all know and either love or hate have some serious deficiencies. My particular beef here is that, by trying to oversimplify some basic physics, those books introduce or encourage some serious misconceptions and tell stories that are hard to believe. For this discussion I have chosen the topic of simple circuits as exemplified by a battery and a small torch globe – can we find a simpler circuit than that? I will use that example to explore some really important physics that all school-level and most junior university-level texts omit and to confront a serious misconception that can arise from studying those texts.