lightning

Something intriguing about the way lightning can be seen to be 'fishing' its way through the sky in high-speed video captures..

At that moment, it is somehow decided that the electric potential is enough to form a coherent bridge, and the electron stream makes its way through the sky.  There are many paths it can take at any point during its trip downward.  At a given point, it is clear there are a few directions where the resistance is sensed to be likely the least.. and the stream diverges in those directions.

It makes its way and some paths are found to be reaching a point of potential that is less than another found at a lower resistance.. so the stream retreats.  But yet it happens in parallel, simultaneously.

It feels as though an element of multiple dimensional shifting occurs.  As though reality is constantly splitting off into multiple physical realities, each with its own timeline.  Us, the observer's eye, our reality is synchronizing with varying realities of the lightning bolt before it finally finds its optimum path.

Perhaps there is something about the electric interaction that allows this process to 'teeter' between universes, taking much longer to 'lock in' to a specific outcome than most other processes that are decided so quickly as to seem completely deterministic.

During the bolt's descent there are many universes splitting off from the various possible configurations and movements of the air, trees, all of the local physical phenomena.  These all occur with varying probabilities, and their configuration determines an overall potential that the bolt may achieve.

Perhaps there is also a recursive interaction at effect on a large scale here.  As the bolt makes its progression, the localized potential fields causes a reconfiguration which again affects the resistance and may cause a path to lose its relative advantage.

This would explain a longer duration of 'teetering', as time must progress for the configurations to make their permutations and arrive at an eventual result.

But its interesting; its as though there is something special about the electricity making its complete journey that allows this teetering between universes that is unseen with any other phenomena.  Perhaps it is so much more powerful and influential on local physical reactions that it can afford a longer period of indecision, and allow our high speed cameras to catch a glimpse of  this typically infinitesimally short period of physical fluctuation between temporal realities that is constantly occurring all around us, defining reality.