Paschen's law

Okay kiddo, imagine you have a room that you want to fill with electricity, but you don't want anyone to get hurt. So you need to know how much electricity you can put in before it gets dangerous.

Paschen's Law is just a fancy way of figuring out how much electricity you can put in that room without it becoming dangerous. Scientists use this law to figure out the minimum amount of voltage you need to give electricity to ionize (or excite) gas molecules in a confined space.

Ionization means that you are giving the atoms in the gas enough energy to make some of their electrons jump away from the nucleus, causing the particles to form free charged particles that conduct electricity.

Paschen's law states that at low pressures, you need a higher voltage to ionize the gas. This is because when there isn't much pressure, there aren't many gas atoms close together to interact with each other, so you need to give them more energy to ionize.

But if the pressure is too high, the molecules in the gas will already be so close to each other that they can ionize each other more easily, so you won't need as much voltage.

So in short, Paschen's Law helps you figure out how much electricity you need to put into a room full of gas without it becoming dangerous, and it depends on how much pressure there is and how far apart the gas molecules are.