Second session, I read the 2nd third of my goal for today.
things I learned from my 2nd grade science book
My favourite fun fact from the reading today so far is that in 1 second, light can travel 7 and a half times around the Earth (well… if that’s how light worked, but I liked the illustrative comparison), whereas in air sound would travel just over a few hundred meters. We all know light travels way faster than sound, but it’s fun to compare the scales. I also had forgotten, from some distant stars light has been traveling several million years to get to us.
There was also a story about lightning. The part about the electrical charge sounded like the opposite direction as a recent documentary I saw about lightning. Well, it turns out if you do an image search for “lightning clouds charge” you’ll see images from reputable sources showing both types of lightning (negative and positive). I had no idea the earth itself could build up local areas of positive or negative charge, and if that is true that is just wild. I had thought the earth generally had a slightly negative charge and that was that. I mean, there’s a reason we “ground” things to the earth right, because the expectation is any charge dissipates. So any local charge is being sustained (by… something?) I’m resisting the urge to go down a rabbit hole and learn about this…
+30 min - 22 pages - 2200 characters - 1 source