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Ball Lightning Created In the Lab
EWAdams writes to point us to a New Scientist report that the mysterious phenomenon of ball lighting has now been created in a Brazilian research lab. The phenomenon has long been reported anecdotally but never explained or understood. Scientists have devised numerous possible explanations, including mini black holes left over from the Big Bang, but have had little success in producing working examples. From the article: "A more down-to-earth theory... is that ball lightning forms when lightning strikes soil, turning any silica in the soil into pure silicon vapor. As the vapor cools, the silicon condenses into a floating aerosol bound into a ball by charges that gather on its surface, and it glows with the heat of silicon recombining with oxygen. To test this idea, a [Brazilian] team... took wafers of silicon just 350 micrometers thick, placed them between two electrodes and zapped them with currents of up to 140 amps. Then... they moved the electrodes slightly apart, creating an electrical arc that vaporised the silicon. The arc spat out glowing fragments of silicon but also, sometimes, luminous orbs the size of ping-pong balls that persisted for up to 8 seconds." Here is a movie of the phenomenon.
Of COURSE, it isn't. Because they use energies far less than involved in a real lightning, but they may have found a plausible mechanism for ball lightning.
As I can see in the video, their fireballs move along equipotential curves, i.e. along the lines with the equal electric field. But the electric charge of concrete floor is almost zero, so ball lightning doesn't float too high. In a real thunderstorm there may be potential differenced in ranges of thousand volts per meter.
Check out the dude's footwear! Flip flops/thongs/whatever you call 'em don't seem appropriate!
Judging from published photos and descriptions of ball lightning phenomena and copy of the video on youtube, this is far from ball lighting.
These things hover over the concrete floor and look like sizzling droplets that can spray around sometimes when welding. It is not unusual to see such hovering drops as they vaporize water in the floor beneath them and so create some kind of gas cushion- hovercraft effect.
Genuine ball lightnings has been reported able to hover in the air, sometimes at considerable height and it was not always blindingly bright...
"Scientists have devised numerous possible explanations, including mini black holes left over from the Big Bang"
I want their names -- show me a scientist who would publicly postulate this.
the real question is why would you be waring thongs with burning balls running around your feet
Can you post your report/s somewhere so we can read?
How is your mother's story "personal experience"?