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Quran,Translation and Commentary in Brief (Vol. 03)
Verse 16THE BLESSING OF LIGHTNING AND THUNDER-BOLT

      (One of the most awe-inspiring of all the displays of nature is a blinding flash of lightning followed by the deafening roll of thunder.

      A great deal of what we know about lightning-flashes is due to the work of a South African scientist, Sir BASIL SCHONLAND who took many photographs of lightning, using a special camera with fast moving films. According to what Sir Basil has discovered, lightning is associated with thunder clouds. In the formation of the clouds a mass of warm air moves upward which carry a considerable amount of moisture in the form of water vapour. As the mass rises, it gets cooler and can get less water vapour then it could when it was warmer. Finally the vapour condenses to tiny droplets of water that forms clouds. The water droplets that form in thunder clouds become supercooled, down toِ40³F, which are turned to tiny lumps of ice. Some of the frozen droplets fuse with others to form small hail-stones. These start falling, but continually bump into supercooled droplets moving upward. Billions of such encounters between water droplets and hail-stones produce in the cloud the electrical charge which finally brings about the flashes of lightning. At each encounter with a droplet the hail-stone acquire a negative charge. At the same time a minute splinter of ice cracks off from the water droplet as it freezes and carries a positive charge. As the positively charged splinters rise in the cloud, the negatively charged hail-stones fall towards the bottom, where it is warmer, and so they melt into large drops of water. This process may continue for an hour.

      During this time the whole cloud is a huge dynamo, continuously generating nearly a million of Kilovolt of electricity. It acts too, like a storage battery, with positive terminal at the top, and the negative terminal perhaps several miles below! Between the two there may be a voltage difference of hundred million volts. While the main charging process has been taking place, a smaller packet of positive charge has been built up at the base of the cloud, below the negative pole. Here occurs the triggering action that sets off the lightning flash.

      As lightning strikes; the energy that is liberated, heats the air through which it passes, and the air suddenly expands. The pressure wave travels outward and gives a sensation of sound to anyone that can hear.

      Lightning is sometimes beneficial to man by helping to provide food for growing plants. Plants are in need of nitrogen which is absorbed by the roots, not in pure form, but in nitrogen containing compounds, called nitrates. There is plenty of nitrogen in the air, but it is useless to the plants unless it can be made to combine with other elements to produce the precious nitrates....a difficult task. Now every flash of lightning causes a certain amount of nitrogen in the air to unite with oxygen. After several further steps, the nitrogen is made available to the plant in the form of the nitrates which it can absorb. Lightning accounts for only a comparatively small part of the nitrogen used by plants. Much more is made available by the bacteria found on certain plants, or by nitrate mine from natural deposits, and by man made fertilizers.

      Lightning also causes a great deal of dangers, as a result of heating and expansion, when it passes through wood by which enormous current heats up the part of the wood through which its routes lie and causes it to expand many times. As a result the wood may split.

      When lightning strikes, it may follow a very complicated path. A stroke of lightning once hit a large elm in front of a country house. From the tree it jumped to the house just below the eaves, and went through the wall to an iron bed where on a man was sleeping. By great good luck he was unharmed.

      The principle protection against lightning is the lightning rod which was invented by Benjamine Franklin. It consists of a metal rod extending up from the roof, or some other high point of the building. It is connected by a heavy wire to a metal plate buried in the ground. Thus the lightning will not take a destructive path if it strikes the house.

FROM:ِ FATHOMING THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE'S

FIRE WORKS. BY:ِ JAMES STOKLEY

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE)

 

 

 

 

Verse 16THE BLESSING OF LIGHTNING AND THUNDER-BOLT
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