Then the team added a longer, pointed electrode to their set of electrode shapes and watched what happened. Left to its own devices, lightning follows the path of least resistance, striking the first thing it comes across — in a thunderstorm, that's the tallest thing, and in this experiment, it's the nearest thing. With no laser lightning rod, the discharge predictably hit the tall pointed electrode first. But when the researchers used the laser filament to guide it, the electrical discharge followed the ionized path and hit the spherical electrode instead.