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Physicists Create Great Balls of Fire

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the cousin-marriage dept.

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."

11 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. Let me be the first to say by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 4, Funny

    Goodness Gracious!

    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
    1. Re:Let me be the first to say by mnemonic_ · · Score: 5, Funny

      -1 Flamebait.

  2. Video? by ironwill96 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
    1. Re:Video? by ironwill96 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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
    2. Re:Video? by Tx · · Score: 4, Informative

      Pointlessly late reply, but for the benefit of anyone stumbling on this thread in the future:

      Modern ultra high speed cameras of at least one type (the type with which I'm very familiar) consist of several effectively separate digital still cameras looking down the same optical axis via a beamsplitter. Special image intensifiers are used on each still camera module to provide "shuttering" and coincidently to amplify the light enough to get a decent picture at the ridiculously short exposure times used. In order to achieve frame rates of up to 1 billion frames per second (yes, billion), and exposures down to a few hundred picoseconds, a pulse is applied to each of the image intensifiers in rapid sequence. Although the exposure times may be less than a nanosecond, the captured image glows on the phosophor screen for many milliseconds, plenty of time to capture it on the CCDs.

      Film-based cameras involving a rapidly spun reel as mentioned in the parent aren't capable of speeds of more than a few thousand fps. However film-based cameras involving a rapidly rotating mirror and a stationary loop of film can achieve frame rates in the millions.

      --
      Oh no... it's the future.
  3. That's great by audj · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

  4. Re:weapons by AntEater · · Score: 4, Funny

    "This could be a potential weapon of the future..."

    Ah! Now that's the way to get your research funded. Forget about applying for NSF grants. Could my research potentially kill someone? If so, let the DOD fund it. No worries.

    --
    Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
  5. Ah yes, Science by GroeFaZ · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.
  6. Dad was a Bush Pilot by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  7. the arcane by bjackz0r · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  8. I expected more from the article . . . by millisa · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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 . . .

    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 .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...

    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 . . .