Scott,
I can absorb all the lucid explanations you and others have posted, but my problems are twofold;-
In my casual observations of lightning, as a layman, I see the strike come out of the cloud to earth, but this may be an optical illusion. My other problem is that when I read Isaac Asimov's book 'The Left Hand of the Electron' many years ago, he stated that whoever (I forget who, probably not Franklin) finally designated +ve and -ve, he had to guess which way electrons travelled in a conductor, and got it wrong. Asimov stated that electrons travel
-ve to +ve. But the earth is positively charged. So which way do electrons go in a lightning strike?
Alan
