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Ball Lightning Explained?
Anonymous Coward sent it in: a BBC story that says, "Two New Zealand scientists think they can explain one of the great mysteries of the natural world - ball
lightning."
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Wow. I can't believe I just made a Magic: The Gathering reference. I deserve to be modified into the stone age.
And here all along I was told it was from angels farting.
Screw the BFG-9000, just gimme a ball lightening gun to throw through walls. I only use a micro size amount of silicon, et al. with some electriciti and BAM! 100 frags! :)
-Davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
Slashdot scientists discovered the origin of ball lightning while attempting to overclock their new Athlons to 1Ghz without proper cooling mechanisms.
"...and then I gave it the juice, man, and it was like, this huge cloud of fire and stuff passing through my case, and I said 'Whoa, Stovetop, did you do that?', and Stovetop said 'No, man, maybe it was the silicon', and I said 'Thats stupid', but then Stovetop said 'I think thats the same as ball lightning', and I said 'that would hurt, man', and Stovetop got pissed at me and left and wrote up a paper and got famous and stuff, and all I have is this charred motherboard and stuff."
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Ball Lightning
This is interesting. While it may explain ball lightning very near the surface of the (silicon-rich) earth's crust, I fail to see how it explains the observations of ball lightning well above the surface. Perhaps these researchers are on to a special case of a more general phenomenon?
That theory says ball lighting could move through windows and doors because they may have cracks in them seems like a bit of a gloss-over. What about passing through airplanes? I'm aware that select flights feature holes ripped in the body of the airplane, but still. ;) Of course, the eye-witnesses could be lying...
-- Laugh. It's funny.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Moonshine! Why are the people who see stuff like ball lightning and UFOs always some backwoods hick you wouldn't dare let get near a lit match? These are the tales of drunkards. Ball lightning. UFOs. Elvis sightings. Hitler an old man living in Argentina. All poppycock!
that little ball lightning becomes a real big freakin ball lightning.
D'oh. Sorry. It just slipped out.
This sig is false.
This one, however, unifies an awful lot of the properties of ball lightning under one theoretical umbrella
Great, a Grand Unified Theory of ball lightning, just what the world needs.
There was a television documentary that showed one way to make something that looked like ball lightning. The experimenter had a warehouse full of surplus submarine storage batteries. These were connected to a metal rod suspended above a metal plate. The plate had a ridge on its surface. When the rod was swung over the ridge, it would strike an arc and small, glowing spheres would go bouncing across the plate. The spheres would vanish after several seconds.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Isn't that what happens when you're only wearing socks and you drag your feet on the carpet and then bring your crotch too close to a door knob?
Religious leaders around the world were knocked on their antiquated rear-ends at the news. Finally, it has been proved beyond a doubt that a phenomenon mistaken by three ignorant peasants in France in the 14th century for the prescence of God was in fact just a ball of silicon! Religious leaders around the world will no longer be able to oppress people with their narrow-minded, antiquated ideas about right and wrong based on these putative sightings of deity.
Dare we hope that this will finally usher in the end of religion? That we can have an age based on stark individualism and rampant materialism? That silicon will finally defeat the oppressors that have held we^H^H (oops -- too grammatical) us geeks down for millenia?
One thing is sure: nothing can ever be the same now that we have explained a rare meterological phenomenon! (Interesting article. BTW, I saw ball lightning once -- no, I didn't think it was God. But it was one of the freakiest things I've ever seen. Let the moderation begin!)
-- Slashdot sucks.
Right here
:-)
It's not the actual journal report, but a summary for civilians
--
Infuriate left and right
I don't have video or photos of ball lightning, but I do have a story my grandfather told me about it and I hope that you might find it interesting. My grandfather died when I was very young, so I have no way of re-verifying this story, unfortunately.
According to him, after a summer thunderstorm in central Pennsylvania, he and his family were sitting in their living room when a ball of lightning 'rolled' up to their front door (which was open, although a screened door was closed at the time) and through it into their living room.
The ball of light, which he described as a bright yellowish white, travelled through the living room and through the rooms and hallways behind it only to disappear through the back door. Strange stuff - lucky for my Grampa, too! I've never encountered such, but I'd love to witness a phenomenon that many scientist discount as hooey only to see it proven true as fact.
These comments and opinions are mine and mine alone, although they shouldn't be.
My dad has written a lot of papers on ball lightning, some are available here.
Two things strike me as odd with this. First the ball lightning is supposed to come from silicon in the soil that is somehow ignited by the excessive heat of the original lightning strike. Second, the ball's of lightning are supposed to have passed through completely impermeable objects such as airplane fuselages and glass. These two facts point to a major contradition here. If the ball originally started out ground level it takes a wild imagination to figure out how it remained burning until it reached an elevation of approx. 10,000 feet, where it happened to collide with a moving airplane.
Furthermore, if it is burning soil (silicon) how in the earth does it pass through solid glass without melting the glass or walls. Somehow I don't think Heisenberg's uncertainty principle applies in this case.
My suggestion or better yet theory is that this is just another form of static electricity manifesting itself in an interesting form. Much like the St. Elmo's fire often seen on ships in strong electrical storms. The forming of a ball of ionizing atoms makes me think that somehow this may be related to some sort of surface tension phenomena, much like a soap bubble naturally forms into a perfect sphere. Also this would explain the ability of the ball to pass through solid structures since it is merely a concentrated build up of static electricity and not actual "burning particles". You may refute this theory if I'm wrong or if you can bore enough holes into it. But definetly some food for thought.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
www.npsis.com
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
This scientist claimed that his data showed that ball lightening seemed to show up in areas of geologic instability... near fault lines, etc...
He postulated that the incredible forces involved along these fault lines caused the quartz in the rock to super-heat and become almost plasma-like.
In the lab he took some granite and applied a tremendous amount of pressure to the sample, and when it eventually fractured, his high-speed camera picked up small examples of this "quartz plasma" floating through the air.
He then speculated that on a larger scale, such as along fault lines, that these quartz-plasma balls of light would naturally be larger.
Interesting if nothing else.
I think a better question would be why I remember details about a 20-year old TV show.
Ignore Alien Orders
I was about five years old, it was raining outside, and was thundering all evening.
I was deafly afraid of thunder, so I hopped on my bed, my sanctuary at that time, to find solace.
It was a "crackling" sound, not a loud crack, but one that sounded different - something very near me. I jumped out of the bed, looked around, and saw something shimmering, no, something very bright that hovers an inch or two above the ground.
It wasn't exactly a "ball", but kinda round in shape. It has a bright yellowish light, just floating and floating, not actually moving a lot.
I was a little kid at that time, I did not know what it was, and as a curious kid, I squad a few inches away from it and watched.
I looked at it for, oh, I forgot how long, but it must be long enough for me to remember that I had to tell someone about it, so I ran out of my room, grabbing my dad and trying to get him inside my room.
By the time I went back to my room with my dad, the ball was gone.
There was no heat, at least I did not feel any "heat" at all, when I was only inches away from that bright floating ball. The BBC report said that something was "burning", and if something was "burning", there ought to be heat, but there was no heat, at least to my knowledge, for the bright ball that appeared before me.
It was only much latter in my life that I learned of such things as "Ball Lightining", but to tell you the truth, I do not know if the bright floating ball that I saw was a Ball Lighting or not.
It was just something that I saw, and I think I am the only witness to that thing.
Oh well...
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
It's frustrating. Despite much high-voltage engineering work, nobody has created ball lightning. GE used to have a large outdoor test facility in Ohio powerful enough to create full-scale lightning bolts, and they couldn't make ball lightning. There are some antenna towers that get hit by lightning hundreds of times a year, and have all their lightning hits recorded, yet ball lightning hasn't been seen there.
And everyone already knows about the lightening in airplanes... You sit down, put your legs up by your shoulders, hold a lighter over your ass, and...
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Tell him the next version of Windows will be faster, more reliable, and easier to use!
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Theories based on burning dust have already been rejected because such combustion doesn't yield enough energy for ball lightning's luminance and (sometimes) longevity. I don't think binding particles into microchains, as this article proposes, changes this problem. There are reports of ball lightning boiling water, melting glass, exploding with enough force to cause structural damage--all phenomena which require far more energy than combustion of the small amount of material that can be supported by the buoyancy of its own heated gas.
This doesn't even mention ball lightning's occurance inside airplanes, its tendency to be attracted to conductors, its occurance without any nearby lightning strikes, or its similarity to other electrical plasma phenomena, such as ball plasmas observed near high-current switches (like on electrically-powered submarines).
Just because you come up with a hypothesis that explains a few of ball lightning's characteristics doesn't mean anything until you can explain all of them.
Nor would there be any reason to expect the phenomena described inn the article to be ball shaped. The best that can be said is that it could concievably sometimes manifest in the manner described by the ball lightning reports.
My sighting fits how I'd expect a silicon dustball (or if you prefer: 'clustering microspheres of condensed silicon vapor') to behave... namely much like the 'carbon' dustballs (dust bunnies) they themselves used as analogies in the article
DESCRIPTION:
It was in 1977, while I was doing a go/no-go test of a batch of 10A (junk surplus) silicon full-wave rectifiers of 1960's vintage. My test rig was an AC plug hastily wired to four 'pin' sockets, two neon bulbs and two high voltage diodes -- plugged into what I thought was a circuit-breaker protected outlet. (the circuit breaker was later found to be shorted 'on')
About halfway through the batch (100% pass rate), a rectifier failed dramatically, producing a sight that has mystified me for 20+ years. I have always described it as a 'bright 4-7 cm strikingly violet plasma-like flame' that shot out of the hole blown in the side of rectifier.
In short: a quivering bit 'o' silicon lint glowing
in a striking beautiful violet
Since this occurred in a normal atmosphere, at room temperature (low humidity - that room was always dry in winter), I'm guessing others have seen similar displays. any other reports?
Incidentally, someone rang in to my favourite talk back radio show on Thursday, to ask DR Karl (the top Australian science guy) why he is getting a ball of lightning whenever he places a lit candle and a tooth pick into a microwave!
:)
Here is the link to the actual question that was asked, and here is a link to the discussion which is very interesting.
Also if youre lazy to check out the above links, here is a direct link to a web page that has instructions on how to make your own ball of lightning!!
Enjoy
like little girls? OK, so I can't give a lot of details, but when I was in the service, we inadvertently created an electrical fireball, umm, somewhere. I mean, it lept out of this, ummm, piece of equipment, and started bouncing around the compartment. I was just close enough when it started to hear my fellow servicemen screaming, and me, being not too bright, run *towards* the screaming. Just in time to see the thing bounce into a wall and disipate a la T2 materializing. So there must be multiple ways for these things to form (no silicon in **my** fireball)if they got it right....
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
The above link is really quite cool - it goes to Lightning on Demand: "Specialists in large-scale Tesla Coils, Lorentz Guns and other interesting high pulsed-power devices".
Lots of pretty pictures of people getting struck by lightning (well, not quite, and it's not at all gruesome - have a look).
...j
See See http://www.google.com/search?q=paul+koloc" for some references.
The balls probably have a stucture similar to the structure of the plasmas rings in the TRISOPS experiment that I worked on 25 years ago. Dan Wells was the principal investigator. This experiment's funding was dropped because it conflicted with the then current emphasis on the Tokamak. Since then the Tokamak program has turned into an expensive white elephant. Last year, on a NASA grant, the experiment was moved from its home at the University of Miami to Lanham MD and reassembled. It is still to early to have any results.
See http://www.aps.org/BAPSDPP98/abs/S3 2 00.html#SG4S.062for more information . There are efforts to raise more funds to continue research into both efforts. Joe Davidson
Nicola Tesla, who invented the polyphase system of alternating current we all depend on today, used to create balls of lightning to amuse dinner guests like Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain). The trick to creating them may be buried somewhere in his notes, but last I heard they were classified as secret by the US government apon his death.
In Man Out Of Time, it's said that he would produce a smallish "fireball" out of thin air as a parlor trick when visitors came by the lab (Note: Tesla's lab was the model for the classic "mad scientist" lab from every movie in the 30's.).
People aren't sure what it really was, but it could have been ball lightning, or some kind of plasma effect. Or something else enterely, we really don't know.
Jon
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Please moderate this up to the level of my Anonymous Coward post (above)
Some friends have convinced me that if I really want to hear about similar sightings, I need to provide contact info, rather than expecting reports to be posted here. Others may be as hesitant as I was to present unsubstantiable reports.
I originally debated whether to post without bonus points (since it is merely an anecdote, rather than a reasoned comment) or as an AC. I guess I made the wrong choice (hey, it was 5:30 am here!) since the original post was moderated up +5 in the next several hours, yet no replies were posted
I have created a hotmail address for this correspondence: burnedrectifier@hotmail.com
Your report will not be shared (or, if you prefer, even abstracted) without your consent
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**>>BELCH
"us" is actually the correct word in that context. Just like "him and me" instead of "he and I" is correct when used as an object.
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