Lightning

I sat in fascination, watching these massive clouds surmount the mountain peaks on the horizon. Ten, twenty, thirty thousand feet into the air, these huge cumulus clouds towered above the landscape. The sun was nearly gone, but they stood tall enough to catch the waning rays, coloring them magnificently while the undersides grew darker, blacker, more ominous. As the sunlight vanished, the clouds began to generate their own. Random flashes, deep in the clouds themselves, lit the whole drifting structure. Lightning without sound flashed cloud to cloud. Occasionally a single fork would flicker cloud to ground in a dazzling display of power, light, and heat. It was a magnificent show put on by nature alone.

A lightning bolt takes half a second. In that time, the lightning heats the surrounding air to a temperature five times hotter than on the Sun's surface. The air around it expands, and the vibrations create a sound we call thunder. Since sound travels more slowly than light, the thunder arrives after the lightning. Science says that thunder can only be heard up to 16 miles away, and travels at 1000 feet per second. You know the drill. Flash! "One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand, 5 one thousand" boom! The lightning is about 5000 feet away. So, about a mile from where you are, something just got hit with more than a billion volts.

A billion volts ... that's enough to light a light bulb for three months. The air, hotter than the surface of the sun, literally explodes. The shockwave has been known to cause its own damage. The sound will travel for miles. And how does all this occur? Well, to be honest, science doesn't know. They have theories. They know a lot about the actual mechanics of how the lightning strikes. But how does such an immense charge of energy form itself in the clouds? They're just not sure.

So I sat there in awe as this display rolled in. First, the lightning in the clouds. From deep within, like something out of the Wizard of Oz, the cloud lit itself. Huge, bright, flickering light glowed from inside, lighting the sky like some cosmic welder in his hidden workshop. The ships in the sky rolled in, towering, growing, becoming cumulonimbus clouds - a whole line of them marching forward. As they merged ... no, collided, they began to shoot lightning between them - brilliant, silent, cloud-to-cloud forks skittering across the sky. Then, not content to share their power amongst themselves, they began to strike the ground. Repeatedly, randomly, playfully almost, the lightning bolts danced here and there across the horizon, ever closer, until, flashing, booming, "one one thousand, two one thousand ...", deep rolling rumbles warned me that the scientific miracle was closer, closer, closer, at once frightening and yet stunningly beautiful.

I finally went inside. The rains were starting. First light rain followed by increasingly heavier drops. The lightning was too close for comfort, considering the power they contained. So I wandered back to the relative safety of my house as the storm flashed and rumbled all around, drifting off again as quickly as it came. And I thought, "Science can't figure it out, but I know the Artist! Amazing!"