What happens when someone goes in a storm with a mirror and get struck by lightning?5-14-08?

Question

Have you ever been told not to hold a mirror up to the sky when it is storming outside,what connection do mirrors and lightning have in common,how can someone get stuck by lightning if they are holding a mirror up to the sky during a thunderstorm?

Answer 1

Sounds like an old wives's tale based on superstitions about mirrors.  

Yes, mirrors to have a conducting surface, and you can talk a lot of mumbo-jumbo about electric fields and vector directions and such, but ultimately that conducting surface is probably insulated from the ground and so wouldn't readily build up charge.  Second, your body is a conductor and has all sorts of weird shapes and points that might be attractors to lightning.  Third, with all the hypotheses out there about what attracts lightning out there, there is very little understood about lightning and very little shown to be true unfortunately.  The best people can understand, lightning travels in more-or-less random pattern through air until it gets close to a conductor that can channel it to the ground.  It tends to hit higher points on things because they are closer to the shortest path, but it doesn't always.  Sometimes lightning misses trees or lightning rods and hits the ground.  I think the best advice is to stay away from large conductors and even more important, SEEK SHELTER in a lightning-safe place.  If you're standing around outside with a mirror in your hand during a lightning storm you are being stupid and you deserve to be struck by lightning, and guaranteed, wherever lightning strikes, it will happen regardless of whether you have a mirror in your hand or not.

Answer 2

What would happen is that if lightning hits the glass, the glass will literally explode because of the superheated temperatures of the lightning....the very high heat, which can reach 50,000 F, doesn't just make glass melt. It explodes.

Exploding glass would then become deadly missiles, which can cause severe injury or even death. It was like someone detonated the mirror with a illicit M-250 firecracker at you.

And even worse, the current will likely jump to your body and you will be knocked unconscious since glass is a poor conductor of electricity but you are......especially if you are wet. Remember that water and electricity never mix......

Answer 3

Mirrors contain a very thin metal coating which  reflects the light and shows you the mirror image. All electric field lines must arrive at a perfectly conducting surface normal to the surface, in this case the metal. This will result in build up of electric field lines at the edges of the metal. This build up of electric charge will attract lightning to your mirror. Since this mirror isn't grounded the lightning will then travel through you. The charge buildup phenomenon is the reason why lightning rods are always pointed.