Stabilis
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quote:
Generally people will think of something physical as something tangible. Is electricity physical? Logically, yes. You could touch a lightning bolt, and there is static electricity.
I hate to rain on parades, but there is no tangibility involved in a lightning bolt. If there were, we would have heard about people touching lightning bolts. As it stands, electricity (lightning is static electricity jumping from the negatively charged clouds to the positive ground), is not solid, liquid, gas, but it includes plasma. The mere concept of lightning is an electron current generated by frictional clouds that form polar nodes (like north and south in a magnet), cold and positive at the top, warm and negative at the bottom. Lightning oft conducts between them as they cycle between positive and negative but can jump to the earth if the pathway is conductive enough and the ground is positive enough. This is why lightning usually strikes in rain as opposed to dry weather, as water is less resistant to electricity than air. Lightning will still occur in dry weather however, and we have seen this occur mid-west in America with forest fires. The lightning is not assumed to be the cause of fires, but the reverse. The extreme convection from wildfires simulates cloud-like friction, and the hot air and the cool air will generate enough charge to strike with lightning, all from a forest fire. But I feel as if I have rambled out of line and will address what I was first addressing. Lightning is not something you could touch, and if you completed its circuit into the ground, hope that those 10 to 120 mega volts do nothing. Lightning, is large-scale static electricity, and static electricity is a build up of charge by either friction, induction, or conduction. Electricity is just a jumping electron from atom to atom, and it releases quite a bit of energy in those jumps, and that electrical energy stimulates our nerves, causing pain... in lighter cases. Lightning is common because of common hydrogen atom involved, which has a single valence electron that is loosely attached to its orbit because of ionic bonding where hydrogen loses its electron to ionize positively.
Ultimately, lightning is action, not material, even if materials are involved. This could have been likened to touching clusters of electrons, but electrons do not cluster freely in nature, they are much too busy attracting to positive particles like protons to be forcing themselves together.
And this is the story of why I cannot sit idly by and hear of touching lightning.
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