Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
And here all along I was told it was from angels farting.
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."
---
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...
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!
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
My dad has written a lot of papers on ball lightning, some are available here.
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...
--
How do you keep an idiot in suspense?
Tell him the next version of Windows will be faster, more reliable, and easier to use!
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
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?