Just how fast does your camera have to be to make lightning this slow?
A mind-blistering 9,000 frames per second. That’s how fast the camera that took this awesome video was.
One of the first things that occurred to me while watching this clip is how unreal it looks. Not in the sense of being bogus or fake, just in the sense of looking like nothing you’ve ever seen before in the natural every day world. It’s like a godlike child is finger-painting a blazing line across the sky. It’s so primal, so raw and powerful and organic, that it can’t help but leave you in awe.
And even at this ridiculously slow speed, there’s a lot of tiny arcs and discharges that zip by almost too fast for the camera to catch. What we see as a single spectacular lightning bolt is actually an extremely complex event involving a lot of different discharges that are too fast for the unaided human eye to see.
Still, part of what I ended up thinking while watching this vid was “Wow, technology has progressed to the point where we can slow down lightning enough to be kind of boring in parts. Amazing. ”
Once, when I was traveling through the Mojave desert in New Mexico with my father, I had the privilege of seeing what desert lightning is like. In a word, spectacular. You get some of the most awe-inspiring lightning display in a desert because the air is so clean and clear, and there’s a lot of friction from the sand moving against itself that builds up a huge static charge when it’s windy. I got to see lightning striking the ground about half a mile away, like the finger of God pointed down at some random spot in the sand and said “THERE!” and a blazing red lightning bolt was called down from Heaven in an almost completely straight line. It was fantastic.
You know why lightning never strikes the same place twice?
Because after the first time, that place isn’t there any more!
I have no problem imagining why all pantheon based religions end up with a god of thunder and lightning. One good thunderstorm, especially one with nearby strikes so you can see the blackened, charred stump that used to be a mighty oak tree or the hunk of red hot glowing glass that used to be a patch of desert sand, sometimes with the remains of some poor creature that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time still smoking there, is all it would take for any primitive people to decide there’s some pretty scary shit going on and someone Up There must be pretty mad.
Human beings are so hardwired for socialization that we feel much better about something once we know that there’s someone in charge of it who is doing it on purpose. The arbitrary and uncaring randomness of reality is what we fear the most. If there’s someone in charge of something, even something as scary as lightning, or even death, then we feel more comfortable dealing with it. Perhaps we can even negotiate with this powerful entity to guarantee our own safety. Certainly, we feel a lot better imagining that events are caused by a being with understandable motives, even if those motives are openly malign.
The fact that horrible things can happen for absolutely no reason, that we might lose a loved one or have our lives changed forever for the worse by something completely random and unavoidable, is just about the most horrifying idea possible to the human mind. We will invent all kinds of gods, spirits, demons, and mythological figures just to bring all things in nature into the more easily understandable world of our hyper social primate minds.
Better a world ruled by Satan and filled with malign spirits than one ruled by nobody at all.