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Physicists Create Great Balls of Fire
dylanduck writes "Talk about having fun at work. These guys have created luminous clouds of ball lightning up to 20 centimetres across and lasting up to half a second, longer and more realistic than before. There's a cool video too. They say it may even help understand how to contain the plasmas needed for nuclear fusion."
Considering that TFS says that the balls only lasted 1/2 a second (something a lot of my fellow /.ers are probably familiar with), a live video wouldn't be very interesting. 6 seconds of nothing, then a brief flash, then 6 more seconds of nothing.
The idea of a self-contained plasma bolt speeding through an atmosphere is just silly. What holds the pocket of plasma together against the wind? I just don't see a high-speed projectile application in the technology's future.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I think the point is that 3.7mb for 6 webcam quality photos is kind of rediculous.
Note the statement I made about hoping for a "high speed" video. Haven't you ever seen those videos of a bullet smashing through an apple? Let me assure you that occurs in half a second and yet is more of a video than what they showed.
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
Yes, it's kind of surprising. Ultra-high speed cameras (>1 million frames per second) can typically only take a handful of pictures. However for something lasting a third of a second, a regular high speed video camera (there are plenty that can do several thousand fps) would be ideal, you'd get hundreds of frames of this event.
Maybe they were having trouble with the initiation of the event, and running at low framerate/long duration to make sure they captured the event at some point.
Oh no... it's the future.
The fact that the video is a bunch of screenshots where you only see the ball lightning in 2-3 of them has already been mentioned . . . But, they claim it lasts .3 seconds, and even using non-high-speed film at 27-ish fps, we should have gotten a good 8-9 frames . . .
.3 seconds and it wont catch fire either... How about "We measure it with a digitial thermometer and it was 39 degrees celsius, much cooler than expected!". I'm sorry, but I think our little minds can handle a number like that if we can handle .3 seconds...
Some of the statements in the article bug me too. They say it must not be hot because we put a piece of paper over it and it didnt catch fire! Er, I can hold a match under a piece of paper for
The statement in the article that bugged me the most, which I think is just bad writing was: "Most accounts describe a hovering, glowing, ball-like object up to 40 centimetres across, ranging in colour from red to yellow to blue and lasting for several seconds or in rare cases even minutes." Ranging from Red to Yellow to Blue eh? So they are not . . black? If you range from any of the 3 primary colors to the other 3, don't you about cover everything that isn't a shade of grey and outside of our vision?
If it was on cnn.com I guess I could let it slide since this'd be closer to their norm, but a site dedicated to science articles? Come on . . .
Didn't Tesla do this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla