What Happens When You Plug a Wire into a Lightning Bolt? Electrical Instability Caught on Camera

"It's easy to forget, looking at a lightbulb filament, that electricity is still untamed and dynamic," says Trevor Hutchinson, a graduate student in the physics department at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR). A two-nanosecond picture of the surface on an aluminum wire carrying 910 kiloAmps (a typical lightning bolt is ~30 kiloAmps). The electric current flows up in the picture, and the rippling is into and out of the page, producing alternating bands of hot (and cold) aluminum--although cold...