system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
I don’t understand how AC electricity can make an arc. If AC electricity if just electrons oscillating, how are they jumping a gap? And where would they go to anyway if it just jump to a wire?

Woah that’s a lot of upvotes.
gpt
Imagine the electrons as a bunch of marbles (or ball-bearings) in a tube all touching each other.

You push one end, the other end moves almost instantly.  You push them back, they all move back instantly.  You're causing work to happen on everything that those marbles rub against.  That "work"/"friction" is what lights up the bulbs, power the cooker, etc.

Now generally speaking, it's not a tube, but in fact it's an entire sheet of marbles.  In fact, not even a sheet, a box of marbles.  It just so happens that, say, copper being a good conductor, means that all the marbles in the "air" don't move very much at all, because when you push, the marbles in the copper wire are the ones to move with the least effort (least resistance).  So even though every cubic nanometer of space is filled with tiny marbles of electrons, when you push them, the ones that actually move are the ones that aren't "stuck" to the others they are touching and offer the least resistance to movement.

In a copper wire, that means that the marbles that do move basically move like they are in a contained tube (with the boundaries of the tube being those electrons that are making the plastic covering, the air, whatever, which "resist" movement more).

If you push hard enough, though, even the ones in the air will eventually get moved along too.  Hence you get an arc through the air.  The bigger the arc gap, the harder you need to push (more voltage).  So lightning is millions of volts, but can clear an arc-gap hundreds of metres long.  It's pushing \*so\* hard that the electrons in the normally-quite-stiff air get moved and pushed along.  That's also why lightning/arcs change their pattern rapidly... they are literally moving along the path of least resistance all the time and the air is moving / wetter in places, so different electrons find it "easier" to move.

You have to push harder, but the air is basically a big huge wire too.

In a vacuum, you don't get arcs.