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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."
Goodness Gracious!
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
The video is more of a 19 second slideshow of 6 pictures. I was hoping to see an actual high-speed video of the event not a "video" of pictures.
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
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?
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").
They say it may even help understand how to contain the plasmas needed for nuclear fusion.
Almost the best excuse to have fun, second only to reproduction.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
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.
When I read the article title, I thought of the movie, The Arrival, given all the talk of global warming, lately.
I recall the balls of fire in the movie were significantly larger and were not lightning/plasma, though.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
So it's taken us this long to do what level 5 wizards were doing eons ago? I'll be impressed when they can aim these things accurately at orcs.
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
People have been producing ball lightning in microwave ovens for years!
Wikileaks, no DNS
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 . . .
Damn, damn, damn, damn. As soon as I clicked post I realized I had committed the hilarious mistake of making a classic spelling error while correcting the spelling of someone else. Of course the correct spelling is misspell which looks ridiculous but is correct. I only spell check for words that feel unfamiliar since I get so many false positives otherwise. I suppose that might be the case for the original poster. Anyhow I apologize and go fix some coffee to see if that improves my acuity.
p.s. But I'm right that there is some sort of conspiracy to misspell the word ridiculous
Didn't Tesla do this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla