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The Youngest Daughter of the Sciences
- jpm_sd 3y agoA tradition that lives on at the Boston museum of science! https://www.mos.org/live-presentations/lightning https://www.mos.org/live-presentations/lightning
- photochemsyn 3y ago...and then along came Faraday, who demonstrated that electricity and magnetism were intimately related, followed by Maxwell, whose theories indicated that light was an electromagnetic field, and people thought physics was 'solved' with a few niggling issues which turned out to be insurmountable problems, giving rise to quantum mechanics (Planck, Einstein, Bohr, de Broglie, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Dirac...) P.S. best discussion of lightning and atmospheric electricity: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_09.html https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_09.html Key points are that the upper atmosphere is postive relative to the earth's surface by 400 kV and a positive current of 1800 amps is continually flowing downwards - which would exhaust the potential difference in about half an hour, except that thunderstorms are continually globally recharging it by bringing large amounts of negative charge to the surface via lightning. This works because the upper atmosphere equilibrates almost instantaneously on a global scale, so it has the same positive potential everywhere.