For my artwork in science project, I have chosen to work on lightning. I find that lighting is a very intriguing phenomenon; I always saw it as something majestic and powerful and have that god like appeal that makes you wonder what if you could harness it on the palm of your hand and be consider as a deity. Perhaps that was the reasons why Zeus was depicted as the god that holds lightning bolts and considered to be the god of all gods. I’ve always wondered what was lightning all about. What was it made of? Why does it happen? How does it happen? As my research progressed I discovered some of those questions and stumble upon new discoveries of my own, where it contains many of Peter Atkins’s big ideas in chemistry.
What is lightning first of all? Well the production of any lightning strike is due to the polarization of positive and negative charges within a storm cloud. Storm clouds acquire excess positive charges on its head and accumulate excess negative charges on its base, which is closer to the earth’s surface. As the static charge builds up, the electric field that surrounds the cloud becomes stronger. This electric field surrounding the storm cloud gets strong enough that it becomes capable of ionizing the surrounding air and making it more conductive which is usually an insulator to prevent a discharge of electrons to Earth, where the earth in a way acts like a nucleus that is attracting the electrons. The ionization involved on this process removes electrons from the valence shell of atoms in the gas state that compose air in our atmosphere and are thus turned into a soup of positive ions and free electrons. The ability of a storm cloud’s electric fields to transform air into a conductor which make the charge transfer in the form of a lightning bolt from the cloud to the ground possible. In brief my theory would just be that a lightning strike is just a cluster of electrons that rushes itself to the closes positive source located on the earths surface.
As the lightning strikes for a brief moment it is noticeable that lightning produce visible light, which is seen, and said to be blue or purple due to the nitrogen and oxygen being present in our atmosphere. The color can also be seen as white as well, that gives indication that all colors on the spectrum are present. In my general chemistry class upon learning about the emission spectrum of hydrogen introduce by Neils Bohr, I learned that colors only appear upon excitement of electron that emits different colors depending on very specific wavelengths. Human beings are only capable of visibly seeing wavelengths in the range from 400 to 750 nm. Wavelengths below that range are very short with high frequency and consist high amounts of energy that produce cosmic rays, gamma rays, X-rays, and ultra-violet rays in descending order. Wavelengths above the visible range are longer with low frequency and contain small amounts of energy, which produce infrared light, microwaves and radio waves.
As a lightning bolt strike a great amount of energy is produce, which then able to break molecular bonds found in our atmosphere. As lightning break the bonds of the oxygen “O2” molecules it then produces single oxygen atom, which then bonds with other O2 molecule and form O3 known as ozone. This is the reason why when you go out after a lightning storm you sometimes notice a smell of burnt odor; this is due to ozone being produce.
The purpose of this artwork was to explain how ideas in chemistry or science in general could be brought out by a single topic. As previously mentioned this artwork holds many of Atkins’s big ideas in chemistry. This artwork alone contains the very least of 6 of those ideas and I will give you three. One of them being the statement that matter is made of atoms by Atkins is clearly represented by my artwork. Reason being that lightning is the movement of electrons from cloud to cloud or from cloud to ground. As it is an actual movement of charges, the charges, those electrons, could be thought of as matter. In this case, because lightning is static electricity, the electrons are the matter in the electricity. The elements that are found in our atmosphere that aids the creation of lightning are in the form of gas, since ionization only applies with atoms in the gaseous state, which are shown in the periodic table in a specific section. This implies that elements show periodicity another one of Atkins big ideas and the production of ozone after lightning strikes is a good example of Idea number 3, chemical bonds form when electrons pair.