Current Events: Lightning and Thunder | Sleep Story

Tonight's episode follows a thunderstorm from the inside out. Ice crystals and soft hail brush past each other in the middle of a cloud, a charge builds until the air gives way, and a channel about an inch wide heats to five times the temperature of the sun's surface. Then the air around it is pushed outward into the sound we call thunder. Along the way: why Aristotle thought thunder came first, what Benjamin Franklin's kite actually did (it was never struck), why lightning flickers, what heat lightning really is, and why the old saying about lightning never striking twice isn't true. There are the red sprites that flash high above the clouds and were first caught on camera by accident in 1989, the ball lightning recorded in China in 2012, and a lake in Venezuela with lightning on nearly three hundred nights a year. It ends with the words themselves: Thursday is thunder's day, and to be astonished is to be thunderstruck. Nothing to follow closely. If you drift off halfway through, that's the idea. Idle Wonders: true stories to help you sleep.