Coolest Video I’ve Seen In a Long Time

Holy crap this is cool! Ultra slow motion video of a lightning strike. It’s amazing to watch the traces (not sure what to call them) following the path of lowest resistance, trailing paths of ionized air, until one touches the ground and WHAM the surge of electricity blasts down through the path.

It looks a lot like the lightning experiments I did awhile ago, but the logic is a bit different. I’m definitely revisiting this to make it mirror the “business logic” you can see in this video.

Man, I love nature (and slow-mo cameras)!

Here’s the lightning video.

Here’s my old lightning experiment.

Grant Skinner

The "g" in gskinner. Also the "skinner".

@gskinner

3 Comments

  1. Heh, yeah I saw that video too and the first think I thought of was it was nature pathfinding (like a* or breadth-first) and it found the ground and sent the rest of the electricity through ^_^

  2. Wow, that is amazing!

  3. Yeah, stunning video. A friend of mine noticed that it’s exactly the way water behave. For instance, when taking your shower, you could see small drops experiencing the best path to fall down, and then when found, large amount of water flow through it.

    For electricity, I guess we could say the negative charged ground act like gravity, and air resistance like friction.

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