# @stem_antics on Instagram

- **Type:** Video
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DcRA828RE-R
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/69422660-stem-antics-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/a9ae06bcc9.jpg
- **Posted:** 2026-08-20T14:49:40.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Stem Antics (@stem_antics) — https://gondola.cc/stem_antics

## Caption

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was chasing static electricity in 1777. He charged an insulating plate with a large electrophorus, then dusted the surface with a mixture of sulphur and red lead. The powder did not scatter. It settled into branching, root-like figures tracing exactly where the charge had gone.

Those figures carry his name, and they appear wherever an insulator loses.

A Lichtenberg figure is a map of dielectric breakdown. Apply a potential difference across an insulator and nothing happens until the field exceeds what the material can withstand. At that threshold the insulator stops insulating. A conductive filament punches forward, and because the tip of that filament concentrates the field ahead of it, growth becomes self-reinforcing. The channel advances, splits, splits again, and leaves a permanent record of its own panic.

The branching is not decorative. It is the geometry of a discharge hunting least resistance through a medium that is nowhere uniform:

- Wood conducts along the grain far more readily than across it
- Moisture, density and mineral content vary millimetre to millimetre
- Each advancing tip carries the steepest field gradient in the system
- Carbonised channels conduct better than the wood around them, so fast paths get faster

The result is a fractal, with measured dimensions typically between 1.5 and 1.7 in the plane. The same statistics describe breakdown in acrylic, transformer oil, cable insulation and cloud-to-ground lightning.

Engineers know the polymer version as electrical treeing, a principal ageing mechanism in high voltage cable insulation. A tree that takes twenty years to grow ends in a fault that takes microseconds.

The hobby version, driven by salvaged transformers, has killed dozens of people. The American Association of Woodturners banned it outright.

Beauty and failure are frequently the same event, viewed after the fact.

#stemantics #materialsscience #highvoltage #electricalengineering #physics

## Stats

- **Views:** 117,091
- **Likes:** 762
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- **Comments:** 4

## Tags

materialsscience, physics, highvoltage, electricalengineering, stemantics

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