What Actually Causes Lightning?
6/2/202622 min
Thunderstorms have captivated humanity for millennia, and yet their inner workings remain deeply mysterious. On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, guest host and Quanta senior editor Hannah Waters speaks with staff writer Charlie Wood about the new technologies that are helping physicists better understand the phenomena. This topic was covered in a recent story for Quanta Magazine.
Each week on The Quanta Podcast, Quanta Magazine editor in chief Samir Patel speaks with the people behind the award-winning publication to navigate through some of the most important and mind-expanding questions in science and math.
At the end of the episode, listen to an excerpt of the fourth movement of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, which depicts a violent thunderstorm. Piccolo represents lightning and timpani represents thunder. Courtesy of Symphony Orchestra.
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First 90 secondsHannah Waters· Host0:00
[music] Even the most cynical modernist or hardcore nature explorer cannot deny the awe-inspiring spectacle of lightning. The sky splits open with bright white electricity, followed by the unmistakable crack, boom, as superheated air expands violently outward, which we perceive as thunder. Lightning puts on such a show that you'd think surely by now scientists would have figured out how it actually starts. Recently, physicists have turned instruments built to study cosmic events onto storm clouds, and they're finding that lightning is far more than an oversized static spark. [music] Welcome to the Quanta Podcast. I'm Hannah Waters, an editor at Quanta Magazine. Triggering a bolt seems to require extreme events more typically associated with supernovas, black holes, and particle colliders. It's even possible that lightning has an extraterrestrial origin. To learn more about these spectacular results, we need to hear from Charlie Wood, Quanta's physics reporter, who recently wrote a story called What Causes Lightning? The Answer Keeps Getting More Interesting. Charlie, welcome to the show.
Charlie Wood· Guest1:14
Thanks, Hannah. I'm so excited to get into lightning with you.
Hannah Waters· Host1:17
So let's start with our normal question. What's the big idea?
Charlie Wood· Guest1:22
Let me give you two big ideas, a question and an answer. The question is the one you just brought up. How does lightning get started? I mean, it's amazing