Zeus was the greek god of the sky and ruler of the Olympian gods, but he also had quite
a knack for handling lighting.
Could humans ever harness the power of a God?
Could we ever control lightning?
Hey guys Julia here for Dnews
Lightning is one of the most fearsome and enigmatic forces of nature.
Since Benjamin Franklin first flew his kite into the stormy sky some night long ago, we’ve
be fascinating by the idea of taming lightning.
Cloud-to-ground lightning bolts are a common phenomenon—about 100 strike Earth's surface
every single second with a force of a billion volts of electricity.
Which can do some nasty damage to stuff on the ground.
and some studies show that lightning could increase by 50% thanks to global warming.
Lightning happens because storm clouds are charged in the atmosphere.
The top tends to be positive and the bottom negative.
But I won’t go into all the details because Traces explains it all in this great episode
right here.
With incidents of lightning on the rise, it makes sense that we would want to control
it.
What if we could direct the path of lightning?
Well not surprising, but scientists are working on it.
Specifically they are working on controlling lightning WITH LASERS.
Back in 2008 a bunch of French scientists took huge lasers into the New Mexican Desert.
When they fired them into storm clouds they noticed that they increased electrical activity
in the cloud.
Unfortunately, lightning didn’t happen.
So they scaled things down and took it back to the lab.
In another experiment they fired an electrical charge between two electrodes.
Normally the charge would go straight from electrode to electrode.
But by firing a laser 5 to 20 centimetres close to the electrode, the charge jumped
to the laser before hitting the other electrode.
This showed that lasers could have some effect on the trajectory of an electrical charge.
Okay yeah so nothing that terribly exciting, BUT in a more recent study published in the
journal Science Advances, other researchers harnessed more control over the trajectory
of an electrical charge.
In a proof of concept experiment the researchers fired charges between two electrodes only
centimeters apart.
The fired a laser through that electrical charge to guide its path.
The lasers ionize the air, and as a charge goes between the electrodes, it follows the
path of the least resistance, along the trajectory determined by the laser beam.
They used several types of laser beams, to create differently shaped paths.
Gaussian beam, Bessel beam, and an Airy beam.
In the Gaussian beam the charge looked kind of like a normal charge (butuuuuuttt).
In the Bessel beam made the charge follow a straight path.
An airy beam made the charge follow a parabola shape.
Putting two airy beams together made the charge follow a sweet s shape.
But what’s really cool is that Airy and Bessel type beams self heal.
Meaning that once they encounter an obstacle, they can go around it and reform like nothing
even happened.
So the charge wasn’t stopped by something in its way.
So yeah we’re talking on the scale of centimeters.
Nothing that dramatic, humans won’t be Zeus quite yet.
So while it’s a long way away from controlling lightning it’s certainly a cool start!
So remember how I mentioned how global warming is causing more lightning?
Matt Lieberman has more on that in this DNews episode right here