It's been great weather so far this summer, sticky and hot in the 90's just the way I like it. And we have had a spectacular storm to honor the Solstice. For two hours on the night of the twenty-second and after midnight into the twenty-third, the skies over the Metro Washington DC area were blazing with lightning. The major part of the storm passed to the south so that I had a good view of the densest lightning display from the side, though there were many jolting bolts directly overhead as well. For the first time, I took pictures of lightning. I stood on my sheltered terrace and aimed my digital camera toward the sky, and though I had no tripod I used a 6-second exposure, to capture bolts that flashed every few seconds. Here is the best of my shots from the storm:

When I was a child I was terrified of thunderstorms but now I love them, as I recounted in this Electron post from last July. And seeing real lightning bolts is the most exciting part. It's just like watching fireworks, but put on by Nature and far more powerful than a few sparkly explosions. I can understand why some people with time and money on their hands become addicted to storm-chasing. How can you see something like this and not experience a true sense of awe? The storm-chasers don't just stand on their terraces, though. Tornadoes, anyone?

Back to lightning: I've seen a wide variety of lightning forms. There is single-line lightning, that wiggles its way through the clouds. Then there is what I call "basket" lightning, a whole network of glowing filaments that seem to weave through the clouds. There is also "root" lightning, which looks just like a plant root with a central stalk and many smaller fibers extending out from the sides. I've also noticed that the cloud-to-ground strikes, which are the strongest and the most dangerous, seem to be "straighter" and a bit more like the "zig-zag" stylized lightning bolts depicted in art and graphic design. I've never seen ball lightning, and I don't think I want to, as it is supposed to be quite dangerous because it can explode. My mother experienced ball lightning very close up, many years ago in her childhood, as it floated through the room she was in and exited out a window during a violent storm. I am here because that ball lightning escaped and didn't blow up!

Looking at the cloud-to-cloud lightning I viewed and photographed the other night, it always strikes me how similar the linear forms of lightining are to other unpredictably wiggly lines such as roots, branches, rivers and watercourses, and cracks in mud, earth, or pavement. It doesn't seem to make a difference whether the lines are traced by living or unliving things; they all look alike in their various sizes and shapes.

The reason for these shapes, as has been well-publicized in the last couple of decades, is that they are all composed of fractals, the self-repeating mathematical shapes which produce nature-like forms when unleashed using the power of computers. The lightning, the root, the river all form due to mathematical patterns, though they look as though they form at random. If you are so inclined, you might think that these are the equations by which God (or the gods) designed the universe! But if there is no God, we are still left with the bright lightning of mathematics, which is almost as good.

Posted at 3:46 am | link