can an electric field or electricity that jumps to the other side become positive and/or negative?

Question

What I mean by electricity that jumps is like lightning, you can see the electricity from lightning.
So anyway, can it become positive or negative? If so how?
How can you make it positive?
How can you make it negative?
Thanks.

Answer 1

In a spark (such as lightning), "electricity" is not jumping. Instead charge is moving. In normal cases, what are moving are electrons.



One side has too many electrons, one side has too few. When the electric field strength becomes great enough, it pulls electrons off atoms (ionization) and the electrons start moving to equalize the "pressure".



The electrons are always negatively charged. The lightning or spark is just the effect of the moving charges through the air as the air is heated. It's not positive or negative.

Answer 2

You can not...not..."see the electricity from lightning." What you see in lightning is heated air (and stuff in the air). It's heated by the current of electrons that flow when a bolt courses from the clouds to the ground (or vice versa, which it does sometimes). But those electrons, no matter which direction they are flowing are always...always...negative charge. They do not under any circumstance change charge sign to plus. They never become positrons.



The direction of the free electrons is always away from the negatively charged area, which is usually the clouds. And they flow through the air to the area that is not so negatively charged, which we call the positive or anode area. This is the ground in most, but not all, cases. Understand the ground is not a positive charge, it just has relatively fewer electrons than the clouds; so it is less negative or more positive than the clouds are in this scenario.

Answer 3

NO.



First of all, and this stupid, positive and negative are relative. In electronics, positive current flow refers to movement of electron holes. In chemistry, current is the flow of negative electrons, which is the opposite. With lightning, you have a potential difference which in a lightning strike means electrons are flowing towards ground (literally, the ground) which creates a potential difference (electric field,) of zero. So electrons are moving to the ground, which means, by electronics convention, current is flowing into the cloud.



Either way, you cannot change positive or negative, except that a chemist and an electrical engineer will have a different explanation based on terminology. (I could explain this better if it wasn't friday night and I hadn't had so much to drink._