If electricity is faster than the speed of sound why does it not make a sonic boom?
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The electrons themselves aren’t moving very fast. The speed at which electrons influence each other is what’s close to the speed of light. It’s sort of like the speed of sound vs the speed of wind.
Even if they were moving that fast, you don’t get a sonic boom unless the air is being pushed out of the way to make space for the object passing through it. Electricity doesn’t push air out of the way like that. With lightning what happens is the voltage gets high enough to tear electrons off of the air molecules, and when there are electrons floating around unattached to a molecule, the material becomes conductive. The electrons are still at close to the same density they were before, they’re just mobile now. With lighting, it’s just enough electricity flowing at once to heat the air a lot, and that hot air expands shoving other air out of the way, creating thunder.
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