Lightning is Complicated - Sixty Symbols
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- čas přidán 23. 06. 2024
- Professor Mike Merrifield returns to the topic of weather - this time to discuss lightning.
More links and info below ↓ ↓ ↓
Previous weather videos: • Weather Videos with Mi...
Feynman Lectures online: www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu
Professor Merrifield on Twitter: / astromikemerri
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Sixty Symbols videos by Brady Haran
www.bradyharanblog.com
Artwork by Pete McPartlan
Lightning shots courtesy of AP Archive: / aparchive
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"...Is Complicated" would make a good series.
"Friction is Complicated", for example!
please make a series on this, @sixty symbols
Awesome idea
That sounds like a fantastic idea!
Flight is another one that many people *think* they understand, but only incompletely -- it's more complicated than that. It's not just the pressure difference caused by the air above the wing having to travel further in the same time and therefore increasing its volume and so reducing its pressure so the air under the wing pushes it up. But there's also the fact that the air behind the wing is moving downwards, so the aeroplane must have exerted a downward force on it and will therefore be subject an equal and opposite reaction, i.e. as many Newtons of upward force. And other stuff going on.
And don't get me started on how matter might not really be real ..... just a very convincing analogy , and what is *really* going on in the universe is nothing like what we understand, but even so it can be approximated by a system with particles interacting with one another, like some sort of analogue computer .....
I agree! "XXX that we observed for thousands of years is still not fully understood" would be fantastic, and I'm sure there's quite a lot to say there!
I would love to see more videos on poorly understood/unexplained phenomena. This is the stuff that inspires new physics students.
Exactly,I dislike teachers that try to pretend we understand everything.I find it more inspiring when I hear about things we don't know,because that is where possibly me and a new generation of scientists can make an impact.
There are so many things we don't understand. Most of them are at the molecular or atomic level which means that it is hard to explain what it is we don't understand. Others are at a cosmological scale which has the same problem.
I promise you this: If you study any field of science you will learn the limitations of mankinds knowledge.
This is the stuff that frustrates physics students who thought they could find an explanation, and never did.
There's a bunch of videos with Tadashi Tokieda (I hope I remembered the name correctly) on Numberphile and other channels, where he talks about seemingly simple, mundane physics problems that are poorly understood or have only recently been figured out (some by him).
“What makes the lightning think - alright, enough’s enough, I’m doin’ it.”
A rough day at work does it for me, mate.
"enough is enough ...hold my beer" --Lightning
I was looking for this comment.
@@BLRSharpLight Timmy the particle feel thats it for the anarchy, now he wants to rule so he stands up like a real man.
words to live by
Excuse me, but this video ended 30 minutes before it should have. I still require more expansion and explanation.
Yes!!!
I have a feeling it ended a couple decades too early. They still need to figure it out.
And elaboration
Agreed
This subject deserves another video it's so interesting!
I like all of your videos, but this felt particularly brilliant. I really love the way Mike talks about stuff, and seemingly gets so excited about not knowing, and the fact it is so complicated and we haven't figured it out yet. Fabulous. Do more like this.
9:32 In the German language, we use "Graupel" in (almost) everyday speech when describing rain that's almost but not quite hail. I do love linguistics sometimes.
Tim Grohmann In the US, the term is used commonly in the weather and aviation communities, but not so much everyday life.
We use the term "graupel" here in England to describe the same phenomenon, though it's only really used by weather geeks. :)
I also love linguini.
I have found that skiers here in the US use the term as well.
Actually it is kind of liberating hearing a physicist admit that there is alot of handwaving incorporated in the argument/theory.
I think it is exciting that alot of things still poorly understood in physics, that means there is knowledge to gain and areas to explore..
A small thunder machine /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ I was just smart enough to guess as long i can keep the imbalance between the electrons covering the surfaces going it would spinn forever.
All science takes place at the border of the known and the unknown. If everything was unknown, then the science isn't working, but if everything was known, there'd be no science left to do :) Science is literally about living at that border and shifting it farther with every discovery.
What a wierd mindset...
Sooooo... What's with that positivly charged part of the cloud at the bottom? Did you think that I'd just forget about it Brady???!!?!
Well, someone did forget something, that's for sure. :P
Maybe a set of ice crystals that are heavy enough not to be pulled up by the convection currents and thus have positive charge as they do not "rub" against against the bigger cousins falling down? ...though does not explain at all why they would clump up instead of diffusing with the negatively charged particles. Maybe the convection currents create vortexes spinning around the rising pilar trapping the positive molecules instead of sending them up?
Possibly due to the water not ice in the cloud, since a cloud is essentially a very thick fog of water droplets. Each water droplet contains a small nucleus of grainy material. It may have something to do with the way the water moves around the anvil shape of a thundercloud resulting in positively charged areas where the water droplets are either moving a certain way, or where they are more or less dense.
It's not well understood, that's for sure.
How about crystals forming while water droplets are combining with surface tension? Are there 'Siamese snowflakes'?
Lets point a particle accelerator at a cloud and create lightning!
There actually exists a method called "rocket-triggered lightning", which is a method to manually trigger lightning from a cloud by using a small Lightning rocket. Lightning rockets have a conductive wire that is attached to both the rocket and the ground. When the rocket is launched onto a lightning cloud, the lightning discharges prematurely through the conductive wire.
ash boon I've heard about it and it is fascinating. But what i want to see here is if cosmic rays are involved in the lightning process. That's why we need to create our own cosmic rays ☈
I was also thinking that cosmic rays might trigger the lightning, was surprised to hear the professor saying it too.
and that might be the reason why the top part of the cloud is positively charged. maybe the rays strip the atoms of electrones...
at least part of the reason...
I love these "understandable topic - have some theories - but don't know the answer" videos.
It's a reminder that we need scientists even in the days of nigh universal access to the whole of human knowledge.
WE. NEED. MOAR. MIKE. MERRIFIELD. PLEASE.
Not even Wikipedia?!?! I've never heard of such a thing.
What about the gamma rays and antimatter being created by a lightning strike?
We'll just pass a law making wikipedia the authoritative source for lightning, that'll save everybody a bunch of trouble.
Robert Fletcher Yes lightning produces some gamma rays, it might even say that on Wikipedia. If it produces any antimatter though it's probably too little to measure, especially from a typical observation distance for thunderstorms.
Not enough energy
Not even a WIKIPEDIA?!? Alright, enoughs enough, I'm doing it
Hi, I'm on the team at auburn university that is building sattelites to send up and measure gamma rays from high altitude thunderstorms so this was a video of great interest
You didn't happen to work with Dr. Sonnenfeld from New Mexico Tech did you? I know he was somewhere in that part of the country working on some lightning related satellite stuff in the summer of 2016.
@@danieljensen2626 "he was" Until hit by lightning?
@@fewwiggle No, he just came back to New Mexico.
Prof. Merrifield is my favorite professor ever!!!!!!!!!!!!
Professor , a galaxy 10 billion years away - peace of cake. A stormy cloud complicated, tricky.... lol
He was more honest on this one that people dont know whats going on. And thats true for a whole lot of topics.
Another epic video from this channel! I actually searched for a video on this topic a few weeks ago and was quite frustrated with the lack of content I found. Thanks!
Another fantastic video. I am loving animated mike the weatherman. :)
I was struggling to figure out how lightning works… then it struck me.
Did it really ?
Write a paper explaining lighting and you get a Nobel.
Love Professor Merrifield, always ready for more of him!
That actually explains several questions I've had in my head for decades. And also opens up a whole bunch of new questions.
Fascinating video.
Very refreshing to hear such humble honesty. Thank you
Prof Merrifield is brilliant at explaining things. Love his videos. More please!
Beautifully explained.
Very educative.
This has been one of the most educational and enjoyable videos I've seen in a long time. Great work, y'all! :-)
What a positive delight! Thank you.
"Why is the ground positively charged?" :) Keep asking these questions. I just love them. The more, the better our understanding. Thanks a lot for these videos by the way - I appreciate it!
This one was one of the best of your videos. Great explanations, very thought and imagination provoking.
Since I was younger. I always loved watching this channel.
All attempts of rationalizing Zeus' temperament are doomed to fail.
Thor begs to disagree.
That's not the same mythology!
Science once again proves that Zeus exists! Ha! take that in your face you azeuists morons!
Zues and Thor share lightning bolts during thunderstorms. One is being positive the other is being negative. I've seen it. I've seen the light...ning.
This was way more interesting than I expected
I come back to watch this video time and again to be inspired
Brady, you have really been upping your animation game with this one, good job!
awesome video with Prof Merrifield! Would love to see him going more in-depth on these topics :)
Maybe the Kelvin water dropper explains something on how a cloud gets its charge.
Also, i'm wondering if the 'stray' positives acts like a 'Gabriel electrode' or a 'triggered gap' to initiate the spark
Conspiracy theorists pay attention! This video demonstrates how scientists behave when something is not yet understood: 1) they don't try and hide it 2) they are both happy and excited because something we don't understand is something interesting and worth spending time on. If we understood everything the world would be a lot more boring.
Yeah until lots of grant money is involved then scientists are often very willing to hide ignorance. Science journal scandals/fraud are almost comically common place.
How many journals do you subscribe too?
@@Psychodegu Just because your heroes are corrupt doesn't mean everybody's heroes are corrupt.
Or something so,simple they can't,be explained might ne a cover up because if you understood the charging is constant and eternal then people might figure out that we live in a river of energy.
This depends on the subject....Electric Universe as an example (specifically pertinent to this vid)
Whether you believe it or not (EU), the way it has been treated is horrendous. DE Scott published 2 papers for Electric Universe. The first, in 2014, provides an alt model to the accepted; Black holes, Big G and relativity. The second paper shows how this same model removes the requirement for Dark Matter and Dark Energy.
None of the more popular peer review journals would accept the work.
The first paper (Field Aligned Currents) has been submitted for 4-5 years now and it has not been disproven. In fact, it is getting largely ignored by Mainstream.
This shows that even when there is nothing wrong with the science, you are not guaranteed to be accepted. The more popular journals either read it and thought 'not a chance' or they disregarded it without reading it. Either is unacceptable and both suggest a dogmatic rather than objective mentality.
How often do you hear about new theories that are wild, almost unbelievable, yet they bolster or support the current interpretations? Time Crystals, String theory, LQG, Entanglement, multi-dimensions....
Anyone even heard of Field Aligned Currents? Or DE Scott?
Any time EU is mentioned it is shot down as pseudoscience. How many 'pseudoscientific' theories pass peer review?
And if there is no one trying to 'hide' or discredit certain knowledge, why is this not widely reported and still cited as pseudoscience, even 4 years on, when it is still not disproven? Why is it not on news? Einstein and Hawking possibly wrong? Even a foot note in a journal?
I've been following this channel for years, and this is my favorite video in a long time! It's fascinating to hear about how much is not known about static electricity and the magnitude at which that process affects the Earth on the macroscopic scale. It makes me wonder how active research there is going on related to static electricity, considering it must come into play to some extent in many many cases when studying physical phenomena.
Possibly the best video I've watched in this channel. 🙂
Blasphemy, it's Thor swinging his hammer onto the clouds.
NaN right. That's the missing piece. It's Thor who's saying:"enough is enough, I'm doing it"
Blasphemer!
'tis the rage of Zeus.
I challenge you to duel at dawn, heretic.
Let Zeur and Thor fight it out among themselves. Winner takes all.
Really enjoyed this one, and I skip like 90% of the channel videos. Fascinating!
Great video! Very interesting stuff.
We didn't even know red sprites and blue jets existed until the 90s! And then we didn't even know lightning bolts almost always emit xrays until 2003!! And THEN we didn't even know lightning can emit powerful bursts of GAMMA rays that produce huge positron annihilation events until the Fermi space telescope discovered them in 2009!!!!
I love the reaction at 13:11 :) So geniune from both of you!
What I find amazing is that there's enough energy in a lightning bolt to accelerate electrons to a point where they can produce gamma rays (by Bremsstrahlung and by electron-positron annihilation).
Brilliant vid.. thanks for this. Legitimately
Mike is my favourite physics talker. He states his ideas clearly, he doesn't get cocky (as some in the channel), and he has the right amount of passionate. Mike Merrifield is to physics and astronomy, what Martyn Poliakoff is to chemistry. Both great communicators, and it's the kind of people that make you spark passion for knowledge. Keep it up.
One of the best videos on the channel!
Great video!
That was really fun and interesting, thank you!
in a society where science and tech are king, it is fascinating to learn that we still don't understand such a fundamental effect. it makes me think of math conjectures that defy solution for centuries - fermat's last theorem, the collatz conjecture, "squaring the circle." it's inspiring to think that someone in this comments section could join a team and be part of a scientific breakthrough.
We cant understand anything at a very deep level,we allways going stop at the quantum mehcanics weirdness, the fundamental questions...what is really all about.
The problem with lighting is a disparity of scales. Charging occurs because of microscopic interactions but thunderclouds are kilometers across and typically tens of kilometers away from your measuring equipment. Storms can last more than an hour but individual events within a storm happen in nanoseconds.
It took until recent years for technology to allow for instruments capable of making fast enough measurements to get an accurate picture of what's happening, but it's still pretty much impossible to capture all the detail that is involved. I'd say completely predicting what will happen during a thunderstorm is a task on par with understanding how a person will behave by trying to make measurements of their brains and the structure of their neurons.
heyandy x - re. “squaring the circle” we might be waiting a few more centuries...
Karl Young, didn't understand the comment. The "squaring the circle" is already solved for more than a century.
The question was that if it were possible to construct a square with the same area as a given circle using only a compass and a straightedge in a finite number of steps. It was proven to be impossible since pi is a transcendental number.
Look up The Thunderbolts Project channel on CZcams.... LOL
Every time you say “…that’s not really understood…” I get a warm fuzzy feeling.
Makes me want to study the subject.
Thanks for the videos.
Great video. Just found the channel - great content.
Wow absolutely fascinating
I knew the basics of that but was very interesting to hear more details - and I also didn't know there were elements of it we still don't fully grasp.
This was a great video. Always enjoy Prof. Merrifield. For anyone wanting further info, there is a fantastic episode of Equinox called "Electric Skies" all about lightning. It's here on youtube if you search for it.
Alright. Enough's enough.
I'm doing it!
Lol, i had to imagine a thunderstorm saying that.
hold my beer - lightning
One of my favorite videos to date because Mike pointed out at the end, not everything is a well established fact, even things we thin k we understand aren't actually that cut and dry when you look at them. It doesn't mean that every cockamamie thing is true, it means that if you're the kind of person who wants to go and figure stuff out, there's still plenty of things to go and figure out.
I think Nikola Tesla said something to the effect that could describe how electricity behaved but he didn't not understand what it WAS.
I want to hear a LOT more about this from this guy!
Thank you!
Would love to hear what he has to say about blue jets and red sprites. Please make a video about that.
Marius687 They're initiated in the top of a cloud and go up towards the ionosphere. Because the air is really thin and conductivity is low the leaders spread out to 10's of meters across instead of a few centimeters at the ground. That's about all I know, but it seems to just be a casual interest of his so he probably wouldn't have much more to say about it.
Could there be some correlation between sprites and solar radiation?
ToyFREAKS It might not affect the incidence much but when sprites did occur solar activity would certainly affect their behavior, since solar radiation affects the conductivity of the upper atmosphere.
I've always struggled with understanding static electricity, so this is somewhat reassuring!
With all the technological developments in my lifetime, it is interesting to see that the explanation for lightning and static electricity hasn't changed much at all.
Feynman Lectures
You guys have the textbooks ???
wow, nice video...didn't know that so little is understood. Thx for this honest excplenation
Loving the new art style in the vids man
There is nothing more thrilling and inspiring and indeed, motivating than a natural phenomena that the scientific community decree as poorly understood. The pleasure of finding things out once again is the thrill of the chase. I wondered about the cosmic ray casing charge cascade breakdown allowing the current to move a long time ago, its always lovely to see others with the same ideas. maybe in another life I would have very much enjoyed a career in science.
Love the wind noise in the graphic :)
Amazing such a simple thing still has a few mysteries :)
Very entertaining video
That was enlightninging
Huge respect for Professor Mike Marrifield for this simple statement and the most important statement for any scientist 'it is still not well understood', 'we don't know what is happening here'. Undeniably, charge and electricity in general is still mistery and literally nobody knows how it really works. Yes, we can describe it, measure it for our own purposes but it is still kinda magic. I dare to say here there is no electron moving in the electric circuit as well as jumping from a cloud to the ground. It doesn't have to.
Feynman himself would be delighted with this upload. Professor Merrifield is attempting to explain the phenomenon of lightning using currently-known physics and lots of things remain fascinatingly unknown still.
Great video. I like his videos and Prof. Moriarty's as well. Thanks Brady.
This is why I love this channel 😀
The same here. Even since I was younger.
More please!
This was super interesting. It will be fun to see if some major discovery happens in our lifetime.
This was well timed. Rogan and Liz Phair were just talking about this.
That was a beautiful video. It's nice to hear someone talking about something that isn't so opinionated and well-decided. It's nice to see the side of science that doesn't yet have the answers. Stuff you don't normally hear in pop sci.
I worked in a clean environment where we used tacky mats to remove particles from shoes. The tacky mat was layers of plastic with a post it note type sticky surface and you simply pulled a layer off as it got dirty. The act of pulling a layer off the tacky mat stack would generate a huge charge that would shock you quite smartly when you touched metal surfaces.
Loved it
Really cool! :D
I like this guy. He doesn't hide that a lot of things aren't understood yet.
Quite recently I've watched a bunch of Sixty Symbols videos ,all ranging from 2010-2012 and now seeing how professor Merrifield has grown old made me sad. Damn.
velox how do you think I feel?
Michael Merrifield I'd go with intelligent.
velox mostly just old!
IMO he looks quite a bit more badass
Agree. Now don a leather jacket and go ride a big bike.
Super interesting
I defended my PhD thesis last week, and it turns out that most of the question i was asked about partial discharges and electrical breakdowns had a part of "it's complicated" in it.
Would've been nice to give ball lightning a mention!
That was such an awesome explanation, love it. I understand it better whilst still accepting that "we" dont really completely understand it.
Fantastic video. Prof Merrifield is always so enthusiastic. I vaguely recall that I read somewhere that storms can produce antimatter. Am I right?
Is the ground considered positive relative to the electrons at the bottom of the clouds, or is it actually positive i.e. deficit in electrons?
10:49
Watched that part again, but it still does not make sense. I thought the earth remained forever neutral and that it could store an almost infinite amount of negative charge. Will be kept bothered by this for the coming few days.
for real man, I feel naked...all the earth feels naked:))
I think it's actually slightly deficient of electrons. I know for sure there's a roughly constant charge difference between the ground and the ionosphere. If you go outside on a sunny day with a device capable of measuring constant electric fields it will read about 100V/m near the ground.
During thunderstorms though the main negative charge region actually induces a charge in the ground, bringing the field near the ground up to about 10kV, at which point electrons start moving around in what's called corona to keep the field from getting any higher (near the ground).
Daniel Jensen ok, only in relation to the clouds is the earth positive. Electric fields don't exist where there is no negative.
Isn't it kinda amazing how the entire journey down this rabbit hole of electromagnetism started with wondering about lightning and it transformed our societies and led to deep understanding of all the stars but we never got around finishing figuring out lightning. The mother of all distractions.
The feeler of a lightning proceed from the cloud to the ground, step by step, relying on the ionisation at its tip caused by cosmic rays - that is nowadays fully ascertained.
Thanks for the great video...
If things are complicated, poorly understood, or difficult to explain in physics it's usually because the particles or forces are so minute that we can only explain them with math. I love that something as huge and majestic, tangible and potentially deadly as a thunderhead is also in that category 🥰 so many mysteries in this universe to figure out!
Its difficult to find actual physics videos that go in depth about what is actually going on. Granted, there is a lot we don't know, but its very beneficial to start that conversation. If you dig deep enough about any type of physics, you will find a point at which our understanding breaks down. We need to keep talking about it! Those conversations inspire!
I knew why I subscribed! And I didn't know static electricity is too complicated.
"It's all down to Astronomy really isn't it".
Simultaneously enjoyable and frustrating.
Van de Graaff generators are STILL important to high-energy physics! The Tandem Van de Graaff (TVdG) facility at Brookhaven National Labs provides the heavy-ion stream used by RHIC, the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider.
I've used the TVdG direct beam to simulate cosmic ray impacts on electronics to qualify them for use on satellites. Talk about having fun at 3 AM!
very interesting more about this please😎👍💗
the area of thunderstorms needs much research, amazing we can find distant worlds but these answers elude.
Thank you for your work. It's so hard to learn anything and then they just lie to you or really have no idea what their talking about.