God's Geek

Reflections and random thoughts of a geeky youth worker in North London...

Friday, August 12, 2005

Thunderstorms

Okay just a quickie... we had a big thunderstorm last night which is always exciting but it reminded me of a conversation I recently had with my husband...

Do you know the way that you count between thunder/lightening to find out how far away the storm is... which way round are you meant to count?

Do you see the lightening then count until you hear the thunder or the other way round? Your help would be much appreciated as I think I have been counting it the wrong way round for a number of years.

4 Comments:

Blogger Phil said...

So this is the second blog of somebody I 'actually know' that I have stumbled across this evening.

It rained rather a lot up north today. Was watching Chesterfield v Rotherham. We lost.

On a slightly different note (and why I chose to comment here) I was recently at Taize, where one of the Brothers told a story of a litte girl who gained comfort in the thought that lightening happened because God was taking her photo.

7:25 PM  
Blogger Helen said...

I think you count from the lightning to the thunder because both happen at the same time, but because light travels faster than sound we see the lightning first, especially if it's further away, hence why if the gap is shorter it must be nearer! Hope that makes sense! Looking forward to seeing you at Greenbelt! Helen x

2:14 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

My poor Amanda. Get back to school! When you see the lightning, then you count to apparently find how many miles away it is. This is because light travels faster than sound. But you knew that, right? So if there's lightning followed almost immediately by thunder, its very close. Voila.

1:07 PM  
Blogger Amanda said...

Ok ok - it all seems rather simple when you think about it. I think I have been counting it the wrong way round but as I have never got struck by lightening thus far it doesn't seem to have done me much damage. By the way, the best description of what happens came with Dan, which involved lots of science stuff... but I can't remember the details.

9:11 AM  

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