From the American Chemical Society
New insights into the 1-in-a-million lightning called ‘ball lightning’
One of the rare scientific reports on the rarest form of lightning — ball lightning — describes better ways of producing this mysterious phenomenon under the modern laboratory conditions needed to explain it.
The new study on a phenomenon that puzzled and perplexed the likes of Aristotle 2,300 years ago and Nikola Tesla a century ago appears in ACS’ The Journal of Physical Chemistry A.
C. Michael Lindsay and colleagues explain that ball lightning consists of a floating, glowing ball that may drift eerily through the sky and then explode violently, sometimes injuring people and damaging buildings. The balls can range in size from a garden pea to globes several feet in diameter and glow for up to 10 seconds. Since it occurs only once in every million lightning bolts, natural ball lightning cannot be studied with scientific instruments. Like Tesla in 1900, Lindsay and colleagues did their research by producing artificial ball lightning in the laboratory.
They describe experiments that led to more effective ways of making ball lightning, essential for further insights into the phenomenon, and techniques that made the fireball last longer so that observations could continue. They developed a special video technique that reveals more information than ever before about the structure of the lightning balls and how they move.
The authors acknowledge funding from the Small Grant Program of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
davidmhoffer says:
August 9, 2013 at 6:23 pm
Party Pooper!
There’s a lot of ball lightning on YouTube
I think they also call this phenomena St. Elmo’s Fire. About 20 years ago my wife and I were standing in the doorway of our house during a lightning storm and a lightning bolt hit a pine power pole across the street. A glowing ball about the size of a basketball (maybe a little smaller) formed on the high tension electric line attached to the pole. The ball moved along the line in a kind of hopping motion till it hit the next pole and then slowly descended the pole to the ground where it seemed to bounce around on the ground until it finally extinguished on the ground. That sure was the most unusual thing that I have seen. Unfortunately, we did not have modern cell phones then or I could have taken a movie of it.
More links to the article (and photos) are here:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/jp400001y
I see four things with this research, all of then good despite some skepticism shown above.
1/ Unlike so many recent claims about doing science, the researchers are actually doing real live science in the laboratory due to the impossibility of doing it in the field despite their apparent desire to do so if that was possible.
2 / They are trying to study and figure out the real time physics of an extraordinary, entirely natural phenomena which has deeply puzzled and usually frightened the daylights out of all those who have seen and experienced the phenomena over the thousands of years past.
3 / Models are a useful tool to help tease out the details of any complex event or situation but these researchers are apparently doing actual real time experiments not just modelling and as is so common in the increasing debacle that is called climate science and then proclaiming the model outcomes as real science as per climate alarmist science.
4 / They thank the Airforce Office of Scientific Research for the small grant program.
Which small grant, size is unknown it is true, but apparently the grant size is very far removed indeed from the climate warmists lavish grant category of some hundreds of thousands of dollars for individual alarmists who claim to practice science, ranging up to some tens of millions of dollars for still another super computer to model a climate that seems to be getting bigger and more complex faster than the climate modelers and the size and power of their super computers can keep up with..
The ball lightning researchers, unlike the climate castrophists seem to have been quite modest in their quest for funding.
Good luck to these ball lightning research guys.
In trying to find the composition, the initiation circumstances, the real time physics, the ending and so many other deep questions about the ball lightning phenomena, they are trying to solve one of nature’s great mysteries and one of it’s most openly spectacular and most closely held secrets.
And who indeed can guess or know the downstream consequences and outcomes if they crack the secret of ball lightning.
ROM says at August 9, 2013 at 11:18 pm… I agree that this is real science with real progress.
But I also agree with Gene Selkov at August 9, 2013 at 6:27 pm.
Ball lightning sometimes passes through walls and sometimes interacts with matter. Whether these are both the same sort of lightning is one of the questions that needs to be answered.
But this stuff can’t pass through walls. Therefore it is not necessarily ball lightning. It may be something else.
Now let me try the preview button for the first time.
Driving through a summer rainstorm in Wyoming in the late 1970’s my wife and I saw several bolts of lightening hit the ground and immediately a blob of lightening would hop into the air and bounce across the ground until, getting smaller the ball went out. We saw a dozen or so. The initial balls were as much as 20′ feet in diameter. It was a frightening sight.
Ball lightning phenomena can get much smaller than pea sized.
Eric Lerner has worked on the theory of micro ball lightning for 40 years. He’s been producing it in the lab for over 20 years.
These days he’s experimenting to create fusion power from micro ball lightning, since the smaller the ball, the hotter it is. So far the highest temperature achieved at his lab is 1.8 billion degrees K. Hot enough for light metal nuclear fusion.
http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/
http://focusfusion.org/
I’ve submitted articles to WUWT before on this subject, but they get rejected because once you understand that such temporarily stable electric arcs harbour environments suitable for nuclear fusion you suddenly have an alternative to the current theory of heavy atom creation. Instead of the centre of stars and supernova producing heavy elements, such elements can be produced anywhere where electric discharges occur.
This immediately gives a radically different view of the universe and of creation, and you find people dismiss you as an electric universe nut.
Can’t have that!
So WUWT has to pretend that the current science of ball lightning is far more primitive than it actually is.
Plasma physicists classify ball lightning as a naturally forming ‘plasmoid’.
Possibly 2 phenomena here. I saw several lightning strikes close up when I lived in Singapore. I recall lightning is the second most common cause of accidental death there. Anyway a lot of lightning.
One lightning strike I saw from 5 meters away, caused a spray of small bluish white glowing balls a few cm across that went 4 or 5 meters up from the ground and then dissapeared, very much like a firework, or dropping a rock into water causes an upward and outward spray of water.
Rick Bradford says:
August 9, 2013 at 7:41 pm
They should have called their grant proposal ‘Ball Lightning and its contribution to Global Warming’, then they’d have been awash with funds, rather than having to rely on a ‘small grant’
Nearly right – need more practice in grant writing though – the rephrase:
“Climate scientists report that Global Warming is leading to a significant increase in extremely dangerous ball lightning which in particular threatens aviation and buildings with electric power.”
From meemoe_uk on August 9, 2013 at 11:48 pm:
and
Okay. Sounds to me that you have just stated that Anthony Watts has refused to publish your articles, that he and moderators are actively censoring you, to maintain the status quo, promulgating current scientific theory while suppressing alternate (and better) explanations.
Well, sure sounds like you have two large shiny balls you want us to look at. But sadly they’re not lightning nor plasma, but if we slam them together quick you might see bright flashes!
ROM,
Agree 100%
And meemoe_uk,
We might mention another person who has been working on ball lightening for years – Jean-Louis Naudin in France:
http://jlnlabs.online.fr/plasma/index.htm
I was in the shower one night and pulled back the shower curtain when the lights had gone out but then closed the curtain and started to go back showering when there was still light. Realizing that this wasn’t suppose to be the case I jumped out of the shower and looked out the window and saw a ball of light coming down the power line to the house then a big boom sounded. I’ve always considered this being either aliens or ball lightning.
Randall Harris says: August 9, 2013 at 10:48 pm
I think they also call this phenomena St. Elmo’s Fire.
St Elmo’s Fire is a fairly steady glowing discharge, while ball lightning seems to be a briefly stable form of plasma. We’d get St Elmo’s on the aircraft when flying through clouds at altitude, generally a lavender cone coming off the engine nacelles or small cones coming off the windshield wipers. Gregory Peck had some St Elmo’s Fire on the Pequod when he was chasing Moby Dick.
Ian W says:
August 10, 2013 at 12:11 am
Rick Bradford says:
August 9, 2013 at 7:41 pm
They should have called their grant proposal ‘Ball Lightning and its contribution to Global Warming’, then they’d have been awash with funds, rather than having to rely on a ‘small grant’
Nearly right – need more practice in grant writing though – the rephrase:
“Climate scientists report that Global Warming is leading to a significant increase in extremely dangerous ball lightning which in particular threatens aviation and buildings with electric power.”
****************************************************************************************************
Nearly there.
Nearly right – need more practice in grant writing though – the rephrase:
“Climate scientists report that Global Warming is leading to a significant increase in extremely dangerous ball lightning which in particular threatens aviation and buildings with electric power.” More research is urgently required to reduce the impact.
Fixed.
Steve T
I call them The Pranksters on Olympus. I think they send other spooky stuff to rattle our cage too.
Something wrong here. Back in 1957 I was doing military training in Catterick Camp. In the washroom one morning guys started shouting and swearing. I saw a spark from one of the taps. Someone pointed to the window. Looking out I saw a pale orange ball, about the size of a football, bouncing slowly along the ridge of the next door hut. The ball disappeared from my view, still moving quite slowly. A few seconds later there was an almighty bang! On recovering our wits and running outside we saw steam rising from a tree at the end of the barrack block. On looking closely at the tree we could see, at about roof height, a thin cut in the bark which ran down the tree trunk getting wider all the time. At the bottom the cut was about six inches wide and the bark was peeled neatly back from the trunk. There was also a small ploughed trench extending about a yard away from cut at the bottom of the tree. Steam was still rising gently. I don’t remember any particular smell. After some discussion we decided we had seen ball lighting.
I most certainly would not like that in the same room as myself.
Richard111: the damage to the tree you describe is typical high-energy lightning damage; maybe in the smaller range of typical. When a lightning strikes a mature tree, the water in the bark boils and explodes, splitting the bark. If the lightning is energetic enough, it can send fragments of bark flying in all directions away from the tree. In one case I saw, a beech tree was completely stripped of its bark and the fragments were scattered in a very wide area (more than 30 metres across); some got embedded in the adjacent trees’ bark.
The trench you mention could be caused by the explosion of a large root.
It was common to see ball lightening is side diesel/electric submarines and in large bombers before the 1960’s. In both cases they use direct current at high Amps and shorts would give rise to the ball lightening.
I imagine that there is a minimum size to ball lightning due to surface area to volume ratio, as a small volume cools faster.
I have seen the lights phenomena on long fencing wires with very dry fence posts. My mother told of a ‘lightning’ burning a hole in the ranch house screen door. The ranch was across US-101 from Moffet field runway 32 on Coffin Road (a family name).
I have inadvertently made what appeared to be, and acted like, ball lightning. I was installing a 250 VDC 400 A rated power source, the cable was lying on the shop floor, when a distant worker violated my tagout and shut the breaker. The ball was about a meter in diameter and lasted long enough to travel the length of the compartment and up the access ladder to startle people in the compartment above.
From the comments I deduce that the figure of there being a 1 in a thousand chance of seeing one in your lifetime (in the paper) is a seriously underestimate.
The point that intrigues me are the reported temperatures for different spectroscopic diagnostics varying from 600K to 15000K. This may be partly due to effectively probing different positions in a region of interaction with a cold environment, but more likely it could indicate that the whole thing is in a stationary state but not in thermodynamic equilibrium. That would mean that the blob is constantly taking in energy (which is then radiated away) from the field generated by the electrodes while being suspended above (hence disconnected from) the liquid. Wireless energy transfer? Do I see a new technology emerging?
In response to meemoe_uk, kadaka (KD Knoebel) said:
“Okay. Sounds to me that you have just stated that Anthony Watts has refused to publish your articles, that he and moderators are actively censoring you, to maintain the status quo, promulgating current scientific theory while suppressing alternate (and better) explanations.
Well, sure sounds like you have two large shiny balls you want us to look at. But sadly they’re not lightning nor plasma, but if we slam them together quick you might see bright flashes!”
————————–
On September 2011, the very same kadaka (KD Knoebel) wrote:
” … It’s when I refuse to sign the Atheist Addendum, that God was in no way ever involved in the process, which logically must follow from there being no God at all, that I suddenly become an anti-science creationist, presumably a 6000-yr 6-day type. At best I become one of those “Intelligent Design” people. I’m also one of the anti-science Christian right (last two are correct), a redneck (yeah I have a 4×4 pickup, because we have deep snow in winter). I also often become a racist (only white people can be racists), anti-women’s rights, a homophobe, etc.
And these “liberal loons” wonder why I normally find it too exasperating to converse with them and try to find common ground, especially when “common ground” inevitably becomes defined as whatever ground they themselves are rooted to. Go figure.”
———————–
It’s really shitty when people who disagree with you accuse you of being a retard, isn’t it, kadaka (KD Knoebel)?
Here’s my take: It involves gas plasma ‘discharge’ and electrical wave (EM energy) propagation around a central ‘core’ utilizing a “Goubau Line” type ‘transmission’ of very high frequency (maybe even in the UHF or microwave region) energy continuously ‘propagating’ circularly around a conductive more-or less central circular core, e.g. a piece of conductive ‘dust’ (i.e. a metallic particle) … it might even be propagation of that same energy about a small central ‘plasma core’, which of course is also conductive (plasma, the 4th state of matter, being conductive).
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A Goubau Line (sometimes abbreviated G-line) is a single wire transmission line (vs coaxial cable or a twin-lead or balanced open-wire transmission line) usable at UHF and microwave frequencies. The phenomena behind G-line operation is the one-dimensional case of an electromagnetic surface wave on a wire with a dielectric just above it (i.e. something is in place in the way of a non-conductive dielectric just over or above the conductive wire such that it yields a velocity of propagation just under the speed of light on the wire.)
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Goubau Line via wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goubau_line
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Animation of G-line wave propagation courtesy of Corridor Systems:
http://www.sonic.net/~n6gn/animation.htm
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1958 “G-Line” patent filed by Georg Johann Ernst Goubau:
“TRANSMISSION OF ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVE BEAMS”,
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Practical application connecting the RF from a RADAR mounted on the side of a tower to ground level via a G-Line: http://w5jgv.com/1970_tower/tower.htm
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I thought that the electric universe was taboo on the WUWT page.
Did you notice one of the cows in the middle back of the herd rose up in the air.
meemoe_uk says:
August 9, 2013 at 11:48 pm
That’s odd, Anthony has banned me from posts on Rossi’s E-Cat LENR reactor until there is an acceptable third party review. (And given that Rossi is more interested in inventing and manufacturing, we may have quite a while to go.)
That’s consistent with his dislike of all extraordinary scientific claims that don’t come with equally extraordinary support. That’s fine by me – I can keep people updated here on “Open Threads” and comments in response to semi-related articles.
Did Anthony actually give you that reason for rejecting your articles?
And, umm, folks looking for a LENR update can check out http://www.e-catworld.com/2013/08/is-cold-fusion-entering-the-final-stages-from-oilprice-com/ 🙂