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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."
This could be a potential weapon of the future. The beginning of the phasers.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
But what do they really know about any of this? The article says all of this was created in a lab inside a glass tank. That doesn't seem representative of a real world environment. The lightning strikes were also altered so that they would last much longer than a normal flash.
Can someone tell me how playing Zeus is going to help nuclear technology?
A bazillion years ago my father was a bush pilot up in Alaska. He had more than a few stories about ball lighting inside the planes he piloted - sometimes lasting for many seconds, rolling up and down the passenger/cargo areas. Maybe they were tall tales meant to impress us kids, but he wasn't usually one to exaggerate.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
As a skeptic, I have tended to dismiss reports of natural ball lightning, but I must say that I experienced something that appeared similar. When I was a teenager (in the 1960s), I was playing my electric guitar in the living room, when the electrical transformer on the utility pole in front of the house was struck by lightning and exploded in yellow fire. I perceived a white light from behind, and when I turned around, there was an impossibly bright shiny ball of blue-white light sitting right in front of the amplifier speaker. It lasted for less than a second and quickly faded, leaving the amp unscathed and completely functional (after household current was eventually restored).
;)
I wasn't doing any drugs either.
Ed Uthman, MD
Pathologist, Houston/Richmond, TX, USA
Would need more mass (fuel) and velocity for this added mass? Perhaps it comes down to the launcher device for plasma packets (what would you call plasma rounds?) - either some form of gauss gun (a bit too sci-fi) or using compressed air - a really nasty surprise for your opponents if you took it paintballing!
We seem to want to spend a fortune on developing new ways of killing each other when there are plenty of tried and tested methods - guess that's where the research money tends to be although I would prefer civil applications for most technology myself.