Board Thread:Off Topic/@comment-26397825-20160116042403/@comment-25396609-20160201041729

Gideon Aurum wrote: lightning is already plasma. so is static electricity.

The difference is something my techie brother keeps trying to tell me, but i don't get it. Lightning is technically plasma, but is a side effect of the leectrical charge that was usually consider to be the lightning itself.

See, plasma is gas that has been ionized by an electrical charge (or some other action, but electrical charge is the most common) and the lightning we see is plasma created in the path of a powerful electrical charge. Static is the same approximate thing, but on a vastly smaller scale.

In the case of this semblance, what you are absorbing is not the plasma that forms the lightning, but the electrical charge that created the plasma, and then pumping it back out later to create new lightning.