The Living, Electric Universe

From the Stars to the Earth to You

Photo by James Maciariello

If you should find yourself outside in a wide-open space with your hair standing on end and your upheld hands spewing blue sparks, don’t be alarmed. It’s just Saint Elmo’s fire. Take a look at the following entries from two different dates in the travel diary of Charles Darwin (1832):

• At this present minute, we are at anchor in the mouth of the river, and such a strange scene it is. Everything is in flames — the sky with lightning, the water with luminous particles. And even the very masts are pointed with blue fire….
• I have just been on deck. The night presented an extraordinary spectacle — the darkness of the sky was interrupted by the most vivid lightning. The tops of the masts and higher yard ends shone with electric fluid playing about them…. To complete these natural fireworks, the sea was so highly luminous that the penguins could be tracked by the streams of light in their wake. *

Modern scientists would be quick to point out that these two phenomena, the electricity dancing around the ship’s yard arms overhead and the sparkling shimmer in the water below, were not really the same thing. The glow down below was produced by biology, by living things. The electricity up above was produced by physics, by non-living things.