Why doesn’t lightning hit the ground in a straight line like a laser?
In: Planetary Science
It follows the charged particles in the air and the path of least resistance to the ground. If those happened to be in a perfectly straight line, then it would be like a laser. But the chances of that would be astronomical.
The same reason you don’t just blast through a tight crowd I’m a straight line and have to zig zag.
Thr path of least resistance can sometimes (read: will always) make the lightning go left or right to reach the ground with the least energy possible.
The best explanation for why lightning is shaped as it is and where it strikes is to start from the clouds, and randomly chose a point in that circle, and from that point make another circle, so on so forth. That random path would normally be the one of least resistance, so the chance of each ‘random’ point being perfectly linear would be a once in a generation even, most likely.
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