Originally Posted by
tomato coupe
Discharges that can damage electronics are produced by large E fields, not tiny E fields.
Depends what you mean by "electronics!" If you mean a modern TV, a laptop, a telecoms equipment rack, or a car, then you're right. Discharges which can destroy tiny silicon junctions inside microcomputers are very low energy - very high speed computing, ever increasing clock frequencies in turn require very tiny junctions, hence very fragile with respect to ESD. Once the integrated circuits are built into modules like a cell phone or another handheld, the design protects them . Bigger equipment might withstand a lightning storm (cars, trucks, and aircraft are rarely knocked out by lightning), but not a direct hit. But it's all electronics and based on the same physics, just a huge range of scale. In major storms we don't ground aircraft just because of lightning, it's more because of wind and wind shear.