What Actually Causes Lightning?
The Quanta Podcast
Quanta Magazine
4.7 • 638 Ratings
🗓️ 2 June 2026
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Thunderstorms have captivated humanity for millennia, and yet their inner workings remain deeply mysterious. On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, guest host and Quanta senior editor Hannah Waters speaks with staff writer Charlie Wood about the new technologies that are helping physicists better understand the phenomena. This topic was covered in a recent story for Quanta Magazine.
Each week on The Quanta Podcast, hear the people behind the award-winning publication navigate through some of the most important and mind-expanding questions in science and math.
At the end of the episode, listen to an excerpt of the fourth movement of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, which depicts a violent thunderstorm. Piccolo represents lightning and timpani represents thunder. Courtesy of Symphony Orchestra.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Even the most cynical modernist or hardcore nature explorer cannot deny the awe-inspiring spectacle of lightning. |
| 0:11.1 | The sky splits open with bright white electricity, followed by the unmistakable crack, boom, as superheated air expands violently outward, which we perceive as thunder. |
| 0:22.8 | Lightning puts on such a show that you'd think, surely by now, |
| 0:25.8 | scientists would have figured out how it actually starts. |
| 0:29.0 | Recently, physicists have turned instruments built to study cosmic events onto storm clouds, |
| 0:34.1 | and they're finding that lightning is far more than an oversized static spark. |
| 0:49.3 | Welcome to the Quanta podcast. I'm Hannah Waters, an editor at Quantum Magazine. |
| 0:57.4 | Triggering a bolt seems to require extreme events more typically associated with supernovas, black holes, and particle colliders. |
| 1:01.6 | It's even possible that lightning has an extraterrestrial origin. |
| 1:13.1 | To learn more about these spectacular results, we need to hear from Charlie Wood, Quantus Physics reporter, who recently wrote a story called What Causes Lightning? The answer keeps getting more interesting. |
| 1:17.7 | Charlie, welcome to the show. Thanks, Hannah. I'm so excited to get into Lightning with you. |
| 1:22.1 | So let's start with our normal question. What's the big idea? |
| 1:27.8 | Let me give you two big ideas. A question and an answer. The question is the one you just brought up. |
| 1:31.9 | How does Lightning get started? I mean, it's amazing to me that we don't have a fully worked out answer to this yet. We used to think that Lightning was wrathful gods, but now through science, |
| 1:37.3 | we know that is electricity. And that's true, but there's still this huge question at the very |
| 1:42.7 | beginning. How does lightning get started? |
| 1:45.2 | And this is incredible that we don't have that answer yet. |
| 1:48.5 | I would think that at least Ben Franklin would have figured it out or something. |
| 1:51.3 | He definitely contributed some really important parts to this puzzle, and we're going to talk about that. |
| 1:55.5 | Great. |
| 1:55.9 | And then the second big idea is that while we don't have the full answer yet, we do have a big part of the answer, |
| 2:00.8 | which is that whatever gets lightning't have the full answer yet, we do have a big part of the answer, |
... |
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