That's great...I was watching some show on Discovery about a team of people who built a lightning detector and rigged it to trigger a super high speed camera (10,000 FPS or something like that). It was the first time this was done and they captured the complete cycle of a lightning bolt. The video showed a slow motion image of the leader forming, the initial strike to earth, and then the multiple returns to the clouds. Simply amazing.
I actually live about 700 feet or so from a set of railroad tracks that is on a little hill. There's a clear view out from my porch. About 3 to 4 times a year, lightning hits the tracks. About once I am lucky enough to be on the porch to see it. You can almost feel when it is about to happen.
Yeah, I think those slo-mo videos prove to us how the electrons in a wire behave as we learnt in physics class, about electron drift velocity and so on. The electrons drift throughout the wire and don't travel at the speed of light in the wire. I think an electron changing direction produces light (photons). An electron staying in the same direction does not produce light (photons). Very interesting.
When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.
Lightning
Posted - Mar 26 2009 : 08:07:32 AM
