Is lightning 2D or 3D?

All real things must be 3D.

Even if you have a drawing on a piece of paper, it may look 2D, but even your pen lines have a depth (although it is very small.)

And in response to Emma Chica - let me assure you Lightning can certainly touch you - and if it touched her she would bl**dy well know about it.

Again, if lightning is light, it is an EM wave and therefore has both a magnetic field perpendicular to an electric field which are both perpendicular to its direction of travel, hence it has 3 components all in different axis.

x-component - mag. field

y-component - electric field

z- component - direction of travel

I love people who'll argue this to death, when really they are know very little about EM radiation and energy transfer.

I think the question can be refined to ask if the pathway of a lightning bolt is in a straight line, or if it moves about in the atmosphere. We all know about the "path of least resistance" but when have you ever seen a lightning bolt start high, go low, and go back up? Never? In the same sense, we see turns left and right and they look like a straight line. However, it is a bright light and can actually be heading in a zig zag in three dimensions. The idea of a matrix-movie camera setup is a great idea, as you would see the lightning bolt in three dimensions as it juts toward the earth.

it would depend on what your def of lightning is, remebering that the 3 definitions we are talking about are length depth and height;

if you're defining it as the passage of current through a gas then possibly you could argue that electrons have no volume - espec if you prescribe to the wave/string theory for electrons (ie chose not to believe it is a particle) therefore no real dimension just e-feild & mag-field which are at 90 degrees but not in the '3-D' sense of it.

if however you are talking of lightning being the rapid expansion of a superheated gas (which creates sound and light) then this expansion has by definintion got all three dimensions-increasing to boot

actually if u form a large circle of ppl and view lightning u would see it flat. Everybody sees it flat. So would u see a cylinder. From this observation you can only conclude that lightning is 3d but 2d relative to our position. Actually lightning is only a flash of light. so you can say whether light propagates in 2d or 3d.

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It is 3d. Only the surface of something can be 2 D because all things must have depth.

Lightning is an EM wave and possesses a magnetic field perpendicular to an electric field which are both perpendicular to its direction of travel, hence it has 3 components all in different axis.

x-component - mag. field

y-component - electric field

z- component - direction of travel

Dr. H

Lightning is an electrostatics phenomenon in our physical world arising in flashes of light which is 3 dimensional and if time is included we have it as 4 dimensional.

Lightning is 3D - much like fire is 3D.

Even things that LOOK two dimensional, like a sheet of paper, actually have three dimensions, one dimension is just very small.

Plasma (not plasm) also has dimensions.

I would say its 3D but it really is not a physical thing you can touch (or so i think) so maybe its 2D