Let's start with dictionary definitions. Heat is the energy associated with the random motion of molecules, atoms, or smaller structural units of which matter is composed. Light is electromagnetic radiation that is visible to the human eye. Electricity is a fundamental form of energy observable in positive and negative forms that occurs naturally (as in lightning) or is produced (as in a generator) and that is expressed in terms of the movement and interaction of electrons.
A further definition of electricity is revealing. It is a science that deals with the phenomena and laws of electricity. Apparently there are no similar sciences dealing with heat and light although quantum physics deals with light and all sorts of science has to deal with heat, it being an ever present factor in any area of technology.
The reason for the different treatments is found in their order of discovery. Heat has always been a factor in our lives. We didn't start becoming aware of light until the 16th Century and we didn't discover electricity until the 19th Century, a time when the empirical mathematical monkey see, monkey say process was well developed. Light was subsequently revisited by a robust monkey see monkey say process in the 20th Century, which is why there is an entire field of science devoted to, well, if not light, to something.
The science of heat involves the myriad individual calculations involved with the particular materials in particular technologies and is solely devoted to practical measurements and very little theoretical analysis. The science of electricity involves mindless monkey see, monkey say naming, practical experimentation and a theoretical structure that is adopted from the science of magnets primarily because an electrical current can deflect the needle of a compass.
Isn't empirical science one heck of a novel project?
Applying the measurable effects of magnets, the positive and negative polarity, dreamed up to describe what happens when kissing dogs turn tail, to an incredible phenomena like electricity without a rational thought other than the mindless observation an electric flow deflects the needle of a compass is the empirical way. Once the observation is made, the theoretical structure set, empirical science makes up terms while technicians deal with the reality of producing and distributing the electricity to consumers, changing the world entirely.
Finally, there's the whole wave business turned into a particle business by Einstein's photoelectric effect morphing into quantum mechanics and then quantum physics. We all remember the joke about the accountant sitting at his desk talking to a customer. During the conversation, he constantly opens his desk drawer and looks down in it. After the meeting, a new associate asks him why he was opening the drawer. He opened the drawer to reveal a sign that said credits on the left, debits on the right. (Hmmm. I might have that backward, but the point is, it is impossible to keep straight the backbone of double entry bookkeeping, which side of the ledger are the debits and which side of the ledger of the credits.)
In quantum mechanics, it's which way the electron pops in its orbit around the nucleus to produce heat. Unlike the credits and debits of double entry bookkeeping, which have a logical purpose, the bouncing electron absorbs and releases energy simply because it's dreamed up to do so. (Actually, like the accountant, I can cheat by looking at the end of What the Bleep? Column 33-05. When matter absorbs light, the orbiting electrons move further from the nuclei of the atoms making up the matter. The further an orbit is, the higher its energy is considered to be. When the electron moves to a lower energy orbit, which is an orbit closer to the nucleus, the atom emits light. The frequency of the light determines how far the electron will move in its orbit and how far the electron moves in its orbit determines the frequency of the light emitted, Further, the number of electrons moving determines the intensity of the light emitted. And, of course, a taboo subject in empirical science is what causes the electon to move in the first place.s)
With all that straight in our minds (I joke), we can watch as Benjamin Franklin flies a kite with a key attached. Something that emitted light, the lightning, traveled down the kite line to the key, heating up the key.
Lightning is light, electricity and heat in full view. Empirical science has no explanation for light, has no physical description for its generation, has no knowledge as to how it gets where it comes from or how it goes to where its going and stumbles in any attempt to explain how it heats up what it strikes. Franklin was comparatively conservative in his goals. He wanted to stop lightning from burning down whole towns. Once he identified it as something that travels from the sky to the ground, he invented the lightning rod that channels the electricity the lightning discloses past the wooden structure of the house into the ground thereby avoiding the heat that would ignite the structure and burn it to the ground.
Empirical science, having a name for it, lightning, stops there and ignores its mechanical nature.
So what exactly is lightning?
Lightning starts, strangely enough, on the surface of the equatorial oceans. We'll start with the water molecule, which is made up of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. For information on how atoms are constructed see columns 18 & 19-05. A molecule of water contains hydrogen and oxygen atoms that are combined and have an orbiting cloud of electrons around the combined atoms. The water molecule is not a structure of individual hydrogen and oxygen atoms, each with its own orbiting cloud of electrons held together into some sort of web of stable equilibrium. The individual atoms are combined into a single structure with a single orbiting cloud of electrons.
When the sun's rays strike them, water molecules do not evaporate. The notion of evaporation is absurd. When water boils, it evaporates in water molecules. The water molecules condense almost immediately and precipitate out of the air as water depending on how hot the air is. Air does contain water molecules, but evaporated water is not what produces rain.
When the sun strikes the surface of water, it field replaces the orbiting elementary particles that hold the molecules of water together. Field replacement is discussed in column 08-05. When the water molecules are field replaced, the molecules break down into individual atoms. The individual hydrogen and oxygen atoms, with no clouds of orbiting electrons, immediately start drawing electrons out of the environment to complete their own orbiting clouds of electrons. As described at the end of the second column on the atom, 19-05, pulling electrons out of the air, and anything else that will give them up, is what produces the cooling effect of evaporation. Heat is the movement of electrons and cooling occurs as a result of electrons being removed. Fortunately, there are plenty of available electrons in the equatorial environment because the same thing that is breaking down the surface of the water, the sun's rays, is being broken down by bouncing off the surface of the water. The sun is depositing heat on the surface of the equatorial oceans, field replacing the water molecules, and the resulting atoms of hydrogen and oxygen are collecting that heat and rising up into the atmosphere with it locked into their clouds of orbiting electrons.
Now we look at what is meteorologically measurable. The air toward the poles has been cooled and is heavier than the warmer air at the equator. The cooler air moves toward the equator and as it does so, the rising warmer air at the equator is forced toward the poles. This means, to refine the discussion to the northern hemisphere, there is a continual circulation of air with the warm air moving north above the cooler air moving south.
However, there is a spatial dimension feature to this movement. The equator of the planet is about 25,000 miles in circumference while the poles have a zero circumference. While the upper air is moving north, the amount of space it has in which to move is diminishing. Another factor involves the speed of the air. The air at the equator is moving at about a thousand miles an hour while the air at the poles is moving at zero miles per hour. Thus, as the warm air moves north, it is always traveling faster than the surface of the planet, which is why we see the clouds moving the same way the planet is rotating, only faster and why the jet stream moves faster than the Earth is turning beneath it. At the same time, the cold air moving south has to speed up, a feat accomplished by its friction with the surface of the Earth which, in contradiction to empirical science, is moving as a result of a current force and which, as a result of empirical science's denial that the surface of the Earth creates friction with the atmosphere, empirical science has created the totally fictitious Coriolis Force to explain (see column16-05).
What results, of course, the warmer air moving north is increasingly forced down into the southwardly moving colder air, which results in weather, storms, thunder and lightning.
This is how that works.
In How the Weather Really Works!, I call the hydrogen and oxygen atoms moving north ice flecs, clouds of frozen atoms, potential water, whose clouds of orbiting electrons have, because of the thinner atmosphere, less movement and therefore less heat, been drawn close to their nuclei, with the resulting atoms adhering together as a result of the excess affinity propensity resulting from the concentration. The ice flecs are, in effect, transporting the equatorial heat northward.
As the clouds of ice flecs move into more restricted space, they are forced down into the lower, warmer atmosphere. Any number of conditions could result depending on the temperature prevailing where they are forced down, but as they are forced down, the atoms move closer together, field replacing each other, and the warmer air escalates the field replacement. At some point in the process, if it is warm enough, the excess affinity propensities of the individual atoms begin to attract one another and, as the normal result of the combination of hydrogen and oxygen atoms as water molecules, the atoms begin once again to form water molecules that precipitate out of the atmosphere as rain.
The clouds of ice flecs carry excess electrons in the atoms' orbiting clouds, electrons that are no longer needed when the individual hydrogen and oxygen atoms reform into water molecules. These electrons have to be absorbed into the atmosphere. If the conversion process is slow, the excess electrons simply dissipate wherever they can go, becoming a part of the air and being absorbed into the ground.
However, if the conversion from the clouds of ice flecs into rain is rapid, the number of excess electrons is too great to be absorbed into the atmosphere and they are discharged in massive bursts to the closest place they can go, which is into the ground. As they pass through the atmosphere, they field replace the clouds of electrons orbiting the atoms and molecules of atoms that make up the atmosphere and the field replacement is so great there are more electrons being released than can be released at any one time. They therefore structure themselves into the emissions that make up the electromagnetic spectrum and we see the passage of the excess electrons being released by the hydrogen and oxygen atoms as light. The thunder is the acoustical form of the lightning.
Heat, of course, is the result of field replacement. When flows of electrons hit your skin, they field replace the electrons in the orbiting clouds of the atoms and molecules of atoms that make up the surface of your skin. If enough flows come into contact with your skin, the atoms and molecules of atoms that make up the skin will come apart just like the molecules of water come apart at the equator. They depart, leaving the remnants of what was the skin, the burn, the atoms and molecules that stay behind recombining into whatever they can. We sense heat directly because we have to keep from getting burned. We see light because we need to use that light to recreate physical reality in our minds.
Empirical science has taken two of our senses that detect reality and in its monkey see, monkey say process, concluded we are detecting two different things.
Electricity is simply our minds using technology to capture electrons and channel them into flows that can become useful to us. Magnets, as an aside, are simply molecular structures with a permanent internal deficit of electrons. The molecules, with their orbiting clouds, are stable while still producing an excess affinity propensity which can only be satisfied by electrons orbiting the entire structure in the orderly fashion we see as magnetic lines of force.
We can see a circuit of sorts develop with the fast forming and moving storms that spawn tornados. The storms form so massively that the production of excess electrons results in massive discharges as lightning. The storm forms a black cloud that blots out the sunlight, which has been field replacing the atoms and molecules of atoms that make up the ground. With the sun's field replacement removed, the ground atoms and molecules of atoms need massive amounts of electrons to complete the deficits in their orbiting clouds. The lightning strikes transfer these electrons to the ground.
However, the storm is short lived. It only blots out the sun for a short time. Before long, the trailing edge of the storm passes and sunlight strikes the ground, once again field replacing the atoms and molecules of atoms that make it up, releasing the electrons that were recently released into the ground by the storm. Those electrons have to reenter the atmosphere and if there are enough of them, the flow back to the sky, at the trailing edge of the storm, sets up a massive inductive flow of electrons that capture the atoms and molecules of air and cause them to start to swirl, producing a tornado. These tornados follow the storm, cycling the excess electrons released by the conversion of the hydrogen and oxygen atoms into water molecules, through the ground and back up to the sky at the rear of the storm.
For a demonstration of the potential differences that exist between the sky and the ground, we can go back to one of Franklin's interesting applications of his lightning rod. He put a lightning rod on the roof of his house and ran a wire into the house. He split the wire about six inches and placed two bells on each end. He then hung a metal ball between the two bells. When the lightning struck the lightning rod, the electricity traveled down the wire and entered the first bell, field replacing the atoms that made it up. These atoms, now with a deficit of electrons in their orbiting clouds, attracted the little ball and it clanged as it hit the first bell. However, the lightning then passed through the ball into the other bell, where field replacement resulted in the ball clanging against that bell.
The interesting thing about this clever experiment is that today it can be combined with the kite flying experiment to demonstrate the continuing potential difference between the Earth and the atmosphere. Setting Franklin's bells up in a field on a clear day and attaching one of the bells to a kite lead, the bell will ring even though there is no lightning. As the ground heats up in the morning, heating up, of course, as a result of the sun's rays, the field replacement releases electrons from the orbiting clouds of the atoms and molecules of atoms that make up the ground and they stream into the atmosphere, joining the electrons stripped off the atoms of air through the same process, heating up the day. Morning Glories open up to the sky and trees spread their limbs to the sky as a result of the flow of these electrons. These are the flows around which the atoms and molecules of atoms form into the animate matter that make up the flowers, the grass, the trees and so forth.
As the sun passes its zenith, the process begins to reverse, with the atoms and molecules of atoms in the air and the ground recapturing electrons, the air starting to cool as the process continues until the sun sets, at which point the night takes over.
A single elementary particle, with two opposing properties, describes the light, electricity and heat in lightning, something that empirical science, with its habit of mindlessly naming things, then measuring effects and turning the effects into laws, is incapable of doing.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com