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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.
Looks like the video link is already Slashdotted. But the video also seems to be all over YouTube (particularly since the story is a few days old). Here's a link to it at YouTube.
Is ball lightning supposed to bounce around the ground like that? I thought it floated. 'Course, I could be mistaken.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
May they never attempt to light a fart bare-assed again.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Don't worry, this is ball lightening, not ball lighting.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I find it fascinating that it displays almost no friction to the floor as it moves about. Plus, the gas jets tell of a very complex combination of structure and chemical process occurring.
It will be interesting to read more research on the subject when it becomes available.
All rites reversed 2010
These things stay on ground... when I was a kid I once saw a ball of lightning and it danced along a barbed wire fence. This is a start but not the whole truth...
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
...that isn't it. The most accurate description I can give based on the one time I witnessed it is that it looked very similar to the luminescent jellyfish that you might see when boating at night (soft glow, bluish, semi-translucent). That 'look', and the fact that what I saw seemed to 'float' (the video shows something that is most definitely not weightless as it drops and bounces about)leaves me unimpressed. I don't know what causes ball lighting (I'm sure it's rather anticlimactic whatever it is), but this isn't it. Just my two cents.
They should have made them bigger. Much bigger. Imagine one the size of a dog/dog-rabbit, bouncing around the countryside. Hail to the ball of vaporizing silicon!
I recommend not using nylon sheets, an hours worth of charge really hurts.
Task Mangler
A couple of years ago I tested the fireplace in our just build new house. It is a fireplace which has a glass door to prevent smoke from entering the living room. Between the door and the frame there is a gap of two millimeter wide. I had put in tropical wood, leftovers of a bridge build in our neighborhood. I had set the lever to the extreme and lots of air (oxygen) was flowing in. Suddenly there was an impressive explosion and about a dozen of these pearls flowed through the fireplace. Three of them moved towards the glass door and actually seemed to move through the glass door near the edge of it. The glass door remained intact. I wrote some reports about it and have send them to some scientists working in this field. One of the possible explanations was that the balls might have been fast rotating strings, capable of moving through the gap. It was a wonderful experience which I have not been able to recreate. It very much looks like these balls in the video
Why do we suppose that all ball lightnings are generated the same way? This is a pretty strong statement as far as I can tell, without the appropriate grounds to make it. However, this particular theory definitely has a reason to live in my eyes, since it would explain generation of lightning balls at large altitude [Caucasus mountains, where they pose a threat to mountain climbers; at least one group has perished to a ball lightning-like object with only one injured survivor remaining], since silicates [particularly olivine] are abundant in Caucasian rock.
It very much looks like liquid metal balls bouncing on the floor, these are produced very often when using an electric arc welder.
Check out the dude's footwear! Flip flops/thongs/whatever you call 'em don't seem appropriate!
har har har.
This isn't ball lightning, what's happening here is mostly oxidation...
I remember as a kid, attaching some extra thin solder wire between a couple nails in a small piece of scrap wood attached to a power cord. Plug the cord into the outlet and the solder would explode in a shower of sparks. I'd do this on sheets of butcher paper, because the solder sparks would hit the paper, incandescent white, and bounce around just like the silicon in this demonstration (probably burning both the flux and some of the lead in the solder) leaving behind these intricate little trails all over the paper. At the end, you'd find these tiny little balls of solder (typically 0.4-0.8 mm.) Point is, you'd ionize a little metal, and get that metal (lead or silicon it doesn't matter) to oxidize, and there's clearly a ball of vaporized metal surrounding the burning bit at the middle, but this is not by any stretch anything like ball lightening.
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.
Magic Missile should've been invented first! It's gonna take forever for me to get enough experience to get this...
From TFA: "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". Translation: using standard arc welding equipment with the current turned to max, the team zapped the crap out of some bits of silicon which were lying around and took a *very* amateur video, not even bothering to put on sensible footwear...
Having said that, the NewScientist article says the results will appear in the high-prestige journal Physical Review Letters, which gives this work credibility - if true.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.
I guess it depends on how big your micrometer is.
that no scientist has ever proposed singularities as the source of ball lightning.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I was surprised that artificial ball lightning is considered so elusive. I thought it could be done in a Microwave oven. I'm sure I can remember some more serious experiments being reported on Slashdot too. Maybe someone can find them.
Lightning gun time!!!
This is no explaination for the phenomenon. Soil? Lasting 8 seconds?
I have a personal experience of ball lighting and it completely contradicts the results suggested.
I was 10 years old ( 32 years ago ) living in an urban town in Crawley, UK. There was a heavy thunderstorm - which I should point out would be a minor storm relative to other countries. It was about 9pm at night.
My brother and I had been in bed in our rooms when my mother came up to us and brought us downstairs. She saw visibly upset by something ( I still recall the event clearly now, for that reason ).
Her explaination was that she had been reading when she saw a ball of light, about the size of a grapefruit, arise slowly from the telephone. It hovered at about chest height for a while and hen slow drift towards the closed kitchen door. It dissipated when it came into contact with the door.
That description doesn't tie up with a bit of soil igniting and burning for a few seconds.
I don't believe there is anything mystical about this phenomenon but I don't buy this work as being an explaination for it.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
the real question is why would you be waring thongs with burning balls running around your feet
It's a quantum space-time effect, you people just don't know it yet! Once you figure this out, the human race will finally be a spacefaring species. Go back to sleep, nothing to see here except ball lightning videos.
I guess you eunux greybeards knew all about that...once.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Actually, Brazil is part of the original America, the USA isn't. Amerigo Vespucci, for whom the continents are named, never visited North America, his travels were limited to the coast of what is now Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. In the first maps of the "new world" only the southern continent had a name and it was "America".
Did anyone notice the 'safety shoes' that one of the researches is wearing in the lab (see video) while doing experiments with molten silicon??????
Light + crappy lens = why bother?
Slashdot hoping to be Digg now?
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
Check it out at here .
Ball lightning has nothing to do with soil, or the earth, in any way. There have been reports of ball lightning passing through Jumbo Jet airliners like an errant ghost and just about every report has heralded ball lightning's ability to hover or simply pass through objects. What the Brazilian labs have done seems to me to have created "Jumping Jacks."
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
Haha, i can't believe they were wearing sandals! You ..oh wow what the hell...
Maybe if they recreate this on a bigger scale using those "lightning generators" used to test things. Maybe we will get floaters then! haha..oh damnit.
Anyway, screw this wannabe ball-lightning, i want to know what that flash in the sky was that turned 2.30AM into 11.30AM and killed the power to my town!
And this lasted for like 3 seconds as well! I can't put it into any category of "lightning"...
OMG It's intelligent! See that at 20 seconds into the movie tries to go over the
cable but bumps back he tries again but this time it jumps over! It has learned!!!
I for one... nah... i don't...
If you don't like my sig then don't read it.
I don't know what's worse, the smell of singed hairs, or the embarrassment of coloring them blonde.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Hmm, flip flops. I'm thinking a more conservative approach to footwear might have been appropriate. What with all that vaporized silicon bouncing around his toes.
Nikola Tesla is documented to have done this 'round about the turn of the century. He used to black out a goodportion of Colorado when he started playing around in his Colorado Springs lab.
This isn't the ball lightning as created by proper thunderstorms. Silicon vapour can't pass through glass without breaking it, as far as I know...
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I have squandered my existence on some packets full of numbers such are data files
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Still the NAT hears what it wants to hear
and access denies the rest
Oh yes, access denies the rest
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and a server by its trade
and it carries the reminders
of every luser guest that logged on
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Yes, the data still remains . . .
Dee oh Ees *kissssssh*
Dee oh, Dee oh, Dee oh Ees
Dee oh Ees *kissssssh*
Dee oh, Dee oh, Dee oh, Dee oh, Dee oh Ees
KFG
Who the hell wears FLIP FLOPS (aks- sandals/click-clacks/slippers) in a physics lab? let alone a lab where there's super-hot materials bouncing around?
also, anyone else find this funny:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/index.php?feed=Sc
They didn't want this technology to reach greedy foreigners hands. Mwahahahah! Now that the blockade is lifted everyone will be able to develop his own ping-pong sized electric ball of death and... humm... do something with it.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
your right but cut me some slack -- it was well after midnight.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
A ball lightning gun!
True. An interesting side effect of all of this is that we now know that 3 red mana = 140 amps.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
You can make nice fireballs about 5mm in diameter that live for several seconds and bounce. I did that in two ways:
- lit the tin foil (tin, not aluminum) with electrical arc and
- melt tin in a piece of glass tube, hit it so the glass is really liquid an then shake off the drop of tin so far protected from the air by melted glass - it will ignite when exposed to air.
In both cases you will get a nice jumping fireball. If you release it over paper slope it will leave brown spots with varying distances between them demonstrating the acceleration.
They sure did figure out how to recreate it, only you might not want to watch for it in the sky
Its awesome that those lightning balls are running around the floor, over wires, past the sandaled feet (!) of the researchers.
Just because someone in a lab makes a ball of feathers that quacks does not mean that they have made a duck!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Now imagine when they create a version of this with a twenty-foot long circumference and they test it on your neighborhood! That would be shocking to see. :P
Pace VanDevender, a plasma physicist who used to be the VP of the organization I worked in at Sandia National Labs, Albuquerque, NM. He gave a fascinating talk on ball lightning a couple summers ago, and he seems like an all-round brilliant guy. As for the ball lightning created in the Brazilian lab, this doesn't seem to have any of the physical properties of observed ball lightning (except that it's a glowing ball). The ball lightning that has been observed is much larger (up to a meter or more wide), lasts for much longer (minutes/hours), seems to float or move in *any* direction at "will" (unlike this stuff, which just moves like a marble dropped on the floor), and most importantly, is capable of seemingly passing through some objects while completely obliterating others. One possibility is that there are multiple classes of what we would call "ball lightning", each with their own unrelated cause.
Electricity too cheap to meter too! In all those off topic links you forgot the important one about using the oil from snakes.
There have ALWAYS been numerous theories, and numerous tests, which could explain a FEW of the properties of ball lightning, but never ALL of them.
A gas ball sounds good, except for numerous accounts of ball lightning traveling THROUGH solid objects (comming out the other side) all without causing ANY damage to the stationary object at all. How does burning silicon gas do that?
How does this burning gas ball slowly float inches away from people, and not cause them to feel the intense heat from the object?
And how does silicon gas (from a ground lightning strike) suddenly appear floating down the isle of a commercial aircraft in-flight?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The 8 seconds the balls in this experiment lasted is 8 seconds more than they have lasted in previous experiments (where the lifetime has been measured in milliseconds).
I've seen reports of ball lightning seen from airplanes, and some witnesses claim to have seen it move through solid objects. A theory of ball lightning either has to propose a different mechanism from the silicon hypothesis or else dismiss the reports as mistaken.
Is ball lightning supposed to bounce around the ground like that? I thought it floated. 'Course, I could be mistaken.
From what I recall Nikola Tesla was able to get ball lightning to both float and bounce around. Then again he was able to do a lot of different "amazing" things, like getting people to think an earthquake was hitting New York.
FalconShould there be a Law?
He said nothing about seeing Emilio Estevez on the fence.
How about Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore or any of the others?
FalconShould there be a Law?
With a scene that's much sexier than it has any right to be, a Tinkerbell-like spark enters the ship, finds a sleeping Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis), moves under her covers, and impregnates her. The alien baby starts to grow much faster than a normal gestation period, shrinking the time frame down to a couple of days. Worf wants to terminate the pregnancy, Data wants to study the life form, and Troi decides to keep the baby no matter what anyone thinks. Once born, the boy continues its rapid growth, but is discovered to have an adverse effect on the specimens of a dangerous plasma plague they are carrying to a scientific research facility. None too subtly, the whole episode explores ideas about family.
While preparing to transport samples of a lethal plasma plague, the crew receives some startling news: Counselor Troi (Marina Sirtis) is pregnant.
According to Troi, she was impregnated by a glowing white light. The ship's new Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Kate Pulaski (Diana Muldaur), watches in amazement as Troi gives birth to Ian, a half-human, half-Betazoid boy who ages eight years in one day.
"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." Really? Hmm...
"Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics and the Humboldt University, both in Berlin, have used underwater electrical discharges to generate luminous plasma clouds resembling ball lightning that last for nearly half a second and are up to 20 centimetres across."
Physicists create great balls of fire 07 June 2006
"Now, however, researchers in Israel have built a system that can create lightning balls in the lab."
Great balls of lightning 9 February 2006
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
Hmm. I'm also looking into this, and the phenomenon seen here does seem to be unusually luminous even for burning silicon.
Its possible that there are several forms of "ball lightning" and what they have discovered is one of those forms.
However, charging the floor with a high voltage (say 8KV) would be a logical next step to see if the free floating type can be duplicated, given that an electrostatic repulsion effect may be in operation.
Also, an additional improvement would be to rapidly spin the vaporised silicon using an axial magnetic field, in the same way as a plasma cutter does.
-A
"Bother" said Pooh, as he was dipped in bees...
Hadouken!
Is "no" the answer to this question?
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
Dude, I wasn't ragging on you, I was making riffing off you. It's a joke. Read it again.
And check out the -1 redundant. Some moderators really seem to have no clue. Troll or flamebait I could see, given that the joke seems to have flown right over everyone's head. But redundant? Whoever moderated that should be forced to write the definition of redundant on the blackboard a few hundred times so maybe they'll remember it.
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I like it that the experimenters appear to be wearing sandals while their white-hot spicy balls fizzle around on the floor. Sacrifice for Science!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
This phenomena has been demonstrated for years at summer camps all over the world. It's called a Wintogreen Lifesaver.