Artificial Lightning

Makeshift rocket launchers on South Baldy Peak. Photo by George Johnson. When I was writing Fire in the Mind, the book this blog is named after, I almost included a chapter about lightning. One of my aims in the book was to explore the edges of science's map of the world, and I was fascinated that something as commonplace as a thunderstorm remains so little understood. In the end the science of lightning didn’t make it into my book, and I didn’t take up the subject again until years later when National Geographic asked me to write the story about Tim Samaras, the lightning chaser I described in my previous post. It was only then that I got to spend time at the Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research on South Baldy Peak and witness a spectacular experiment. It is the nature of journalism that some of the people who help ...