Electricity – Video 3 – Second Timers Quiz

LIGHTNING INFO: Lightning bolts can look like they are 5 or 10 feet wide, but they are actually surprisingly thin–only about one foot wide. The bolts appear to be wide because they are so bright that they blast the area around them with light.

LIGHTNING INFO: One negative lightning bolt–which is 95% of the lightning on earth–may pack in 100 million volts and generate forces of many tons of TNT.

Positive lightning bolts which form at the top of clouds are the granddaddies of them all.  They can reach an astonishing 1 trillion volts!

LIGHTNING INFO: Have you ever seen a lightning bolt but not heard its thunder?  It’s because thunder typically dissipates in less than twelve miles because traveling through a vacuum dampens its sound.

LIGHTNING INFO: If lighting is silent and has no thunder, the lightning was further away than 22 miles.

LIGHTNING INFO: Thunder happens because temperatures in the path of a lightning bolt reach 90,000ºF instantaneously. The noise of thunder is caused by the lightning superheating air molecules into a plasma state which causes them to explode outward.  This creates a huge shock wave which rockets out a sonic boom far more powerful than those created by jets when they exceed the speed of sound!

SPEED OF ELECTRICITY: Electricity travels through metals like copper more easily than plastic because valence atoms are knocked away from electrons more easily in metals than in plastics. 

SPEED OF ELECTRICITY:  The pulse that transfers between electrons is very fast, but the actual speed of electrons is very slow.

SPEED OF ELECTRICITY:  The speed of the electron’s pulse may be as fast as the speed of light.

SPEED OF ELECTRICITY:  The actual speed of electrons is called the swift velocity. It is very slow, maybe as slow as a snail moves.