Steven Gaddey, age Li, of Candler, N. C., for his question:

Does thunder come before lightning?

The sun does not circle around our little planet. The mighty stars do not arrange themselves in patterns to parade over our sky. As we learn about scienee, we learn to question what we see. But in the ease of a dramatic thunderstorm, we can trust our eyes and our ears. The lightning seems to come before the thunder  ¬and so it does.

Often on a summer's day the fluffy white cumulus clouds pile up into a towering thunderhead. The whopping weather event is shaped like a monster flat top aircraft carrier, and it is just as full of ammunition. The turbulent grinds whirl up and down and in all directions. Masses of warm air brush with masses of frosty air; pockets of damp air collide with pockets of dry air.

At its base, the magnificent thunderhead may be 10 miles wide, and its table¬top may tower seven miles high. And the massive cloud is a powerhouse of conflict arid weathery warfare. The soldiers are miniature molecules Of gas, and in the violent combat many of them lose some of their outer electrons. This builds up massive charges of electricity within the warring cloud.

These charges of electricity must be discharged or canceled. This is what happens with every flash of lightning. In one flash the storm cloud may discharge enough electricity to light a city. The searing flash rips through the cloud faster than the air molecules can get out of the way. They resist, like a solid wall. But the force of the discharge cuts through, breaking the wall of resisting air.

A flash of lightning breaks the sound barrier in dust the Same way a supersonic Jet breaks the sound barrier. And when that happens, you know what comes next. The breakthrough is followed by a sonic boom. The sonic boom that follows the lightning is a peal of roaring thunder. It follows the lightning in a split second. But light travels faster than sound, so our eyes see the lightning before the thunder reaches our ears.

Light travels at more than a million Miles an hour   fast enough to whip around the equator seven times in a second. The image of the flash, then, reaches our eyes in no time at all. Sound covers a mile in about five seconds. If the thunder lags 10 seconds behind the lightning, We know that the storm is about two miles away.