I saw the answer/explanation coming after the comments some of you guys gave. I didn't realize it would be 1/c, but that coupling to the nearby wire would occur almost immediately, long before signal reached far end of wire loop. (I see electromagnetic fields)
That's been my opinion. The initial turn-on transient won't have enough power to turn on the light. The video is quite disingenuous because when he closes the light switch the light turns on "instantaneously" and remains on. This is absolutely wrong.
His ground rules are:
1. no wire resistance
2. no wire inductance
3. being 1 m apart, the wire act as a giant (perfect) capacitor
The turn-on transient turns the light on.
Did he actually give all those rules? Maxwell must be rolling over in his grave.
You can't have "no inductance"
You can't have EM propagation without magnetic field, and you can't have magnetic field from moving charges without inductance.
Rising voltage in one wire would pull voltage up in other wire,
and current flowing in one wire would induce current in other wire.
For parallel transmission lines (e.g. traces in a PCB or cable) these effects tend to cancel at far end, reducing crosstalk.
But at near end, they add together increasing cross talk.
Both capacitance and inductance should contribute to pushing current through the light bulb. but given wire dimension and spacing I don't expect significant power transfer. Impedance of free space is 377 ohms. Whatever load that causes wire to present to battery, most of the energy (e.g. 12V^2/377ohm = ~ 0.5W or whatever) is going to be radiated for someone in another galaxy to detect. I don't think much will be gathered by the skinny wire 1 meter away.
Hit resonance, then current in the two wires contribute to cancel fields propagating a great distance.
A single wire would be an antenna. Two wires nearby would be a microwave coupler. Near resonant frequency driving source feels reduced impedance as power collected from second wire is carried away.
Undersea cable, wrapped in steel - signal lost in the steel? I don't think so.
If signal is sent across a twisted pair, they are more tightly coupled, and little energy spreads out to the lossy steel.
Transmission line characteristics are RLCG. These terms include loss in conductor and loss in dielectric. Propagation delay comes from inductance and (frequency dependent) capacitance. So propagation is frequency dependent, and shape of square pulses is not preserved.
Solution back then was to engineer cables (with magnetic materials?) for frequency independent propagation velocity, preserving wave shape.
Solution today is divide up data packet into multiple frequency bands (like multiple radio stations), and send portions of data over each band, which is narrow enough to preserve signal integrity. DSL works this way.