I’m wondering if trying to “bridge” some mysteries around quantum physics and time won’t help us solve the puzzle of lightning, especially your last question: “why do some lightnings stay in the cloud and others come down to the ground”.

If you buy into the “multiverse” theories and other emerging theories from theoretical physics, then lightning only strikes once it knows it will reach the ground. For that matter, by which mechanism does lightning “know” it should take a more or less straight path down towards the Earth and not go into weird random motions following random trajectories depending on where, in the air it traverses from cloud to ground, there is less “resistance”?

In my understanding, you could say that there is a feedback loop between “past” and “future” here, where lightning follows the most “optimal” path (one of least resistance) but at the condition that the path gets it to it’s end destination (the ground). In other words, the energy from the lightning, at certain “time” intervals, attempts one trajectory, stretching as far as that energy allows it to go, and then retracts back to it’s initial position and corrects it’s trajectory according to what it has learned. And we get to see the “consolidated” timeline when in fact, there have been millions and millions of “attempts” in parallel realities/universes.

You could extend that logic to everything, in fact, if you want to get “metaphysical”. You could say that WE are like a self-aware ball of pure energy which “prods” and tests the “future” in our own way (what we do every day, planning, anticipating, thinking…) to make sure that we advance through “time” relatively unscathed, or loosing the least energy possible in the process (the principle of least action).