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(Photo: mrshaw) |
Imagine standing in the midst of a thunderstorm in an ancient city. Under the flash of lightning, you would witness a surreal scene. The bustling streets seem to freeze in an instant: horses are positioned as if pulling a carriage, their legs raised in the air; the carriages themselves also stand still, with every spoke clearly visible…
This apparent stillness is due to the nature of lightning, which, like all electric discharges, exists for an extremely brief moment—so brief that it cannot be measured by conventional means. However, through indirect methods, it has been established that lightning lasts between 0.001 and 0.2 seconds (with cloud-to-cloud lightning lasting even longer, up to 1.5 seconds).
In such fleeting moments, nothing moves distinctly to our eyes. Each spoke of a rapidly moving wheel only travels a minuscule fraction of a millimeter, which, to the naked eye, appears completely motionless. The impression is further intensified because the image is retained in our vision longer than the duration of the lightning itself.
