[Editor’s note: This video disappeared, but it has been archived here. We’re leaving the original links as-were in case they come back up.]
The aptly named [LightingOnDemand] has created a Lorentz cannon that can fire a lightning bolt. Honestly, as you can see in the video below, it looks like something from a bad 1950s science fiction movie. The inspiration was researchers using rockets trailing thin wires to attract lightning.
How does the tiny wire carry that much juice? It doesn’t, really. The wire vaporizes into plasma, and if the pulse is fast enough, the Lorentz force hold the plasma together. The rest is non-trivial high-voltage engineering.
