A musing and entertaining classes may improve students’ engagement and consequently their understanding.1 Previous work has shown the presence of misconceptions about electrostatics among students in introductory physics courses.2–4 Intending to seek new strategies to motivate students using topics of their interest, this work presents a striking and instructive example of how, with the basic concepts of electrostatics, we can farcically demonstrate that electrical storms may have caused the extinction of unicorns.
As storm clouds are extensive, convection phenomena occur in them. The movement of these air masses causes them to rub against each other, which causes electrification by friction. The positive charges remain at the top, while the negative ones accumulate at the bottom, closer to Earth’s surface. This causes a redistribution of the charges in the soil by the induction method, resulting in a configuration like the one shown in Fig. 1.5,6
Under normal...