What is Lightning? Why does wearing rubber shoes help you in a storm?

Examples of a small-scale static discharge is like that static shock you get when you touch a doorknob. Now image that shock at a larger scale. That shock is lightning. Lighting is static electricity caused by storm clouds. The amount of electric potential in something is the measure of how much energy or volts something can produce in an electric field. Lightning has the electric potential of millions of volts which causes it to unleash large amounts of energy in different forms (heat, light, sound).

During a thunderstorm, lightning can strike the ground at any moment. Rainwater conducts electricity (because it's acidic) and with all the rainwater on the ground it is important to have rubber at the soles of our shoes. Should we have metal soles, the electric charges from the lightning -- which like said before has the electric potential of a million volts-- can travel to ground, through the water, up the soles of our shoes to our bodies. Since we do not want the charges to get to us we wear rubber at the bottom of our shoes because rubber is an electric insulator (they help prevent electric charges to pass through easily). That way we can walk, sing and dance our hearts out in the rain without being the night's special of "fried human on a stick".

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