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.
Ball and blob lightning may be more than one phenomonen. I can think of at least three different items:
1: I once saw an orange blob a few inches in diameter move with the wind after forming as a result of lightning hitting an outdoor antenna. My guess is that the lightning hit encrusted bird poop, which is conductive when wet. Bird poop has significant amounts of sodium compounds. Vaporized sodium compounds and sodium vapor glow at lower temperatures.
2: When a lightning stroke ends, sometimes “beads” in it form that cool more slowly then the rest of the stroke.
3: Many descriptions of ball lightning sound to me like hot or burning droplets of molten metal. Most molten metals generally do not stick to nonmetallic materials. Many can form larger drops than water or mercury. If they cause vapors to emit from what they are rolling along, the vapors can cause the blobs of molten metal to skitter and sometimes even slightly bounce. With sufficient heating by an electric arc, aluminum and molten steel can burn. Once aluminum gets ignited, it can burn in a manner similar to that of magnesium. Notice that steel wool is combustible, and most old fashioned flashbulbs larger than the ones in flashcubes had aluminum and oxygen. That aluminum can burn like magnesium if ignited in air by the arc produced by a neon sign transformer. (Flames usually don’t work because they cause the aluminum to get a significant oxide coating before it can ignite.)
4: There may be something else that is ball lightning.
According to models a consesus has been approved.
I was seated in the living room when there was a brilliant flash of light to my right and sound like a nearby cannon shot. We had an old-time telephone on the wall to my right and as my eyes looked toward the flash I saw a ball of light apparently coming out of the telephone mouthpiece. It was bigger than a golf ball but smaller than a tennis ball. It was very bright such that my eyes automatically followed it as it floated in a gentle arc for about 8 feet, hit the carpeted floor and bounced once, perhaps rising for a foot, then continuing to fall down a hot-air register. The movement appeared to be slow but the entire sequence only took a few seconds. The ball of light did not seem to change its size during that time. Lightening had struck a telephone pole just half a block away from our home.
SemiOT: We had a good t-storm here in Spokane last night, and KREM-tv viewers sent in some spectacular lightning pics. One picture shows a strange broad shaft of light that doesn’t look like a camera artifact…. but I suppose it could be.
http://www.krem.com/news/Storms-light-up-Inland-Northwest-219112341.html
@RogerKnights
I’m sure they do. Some of it might be from Asgard (Loki in particular), but I think they are all in league with each other.
>Did Anthony actually give you that reason for rejecting your articles?
He once emailed me to say I needed to give my real name, so I did, but then he still didn’t publish my submission, and he didn’t give a reason for it. This prompted me to look at the WUWT blacklist of topics and found electric universe theory there. There’s no getting away from the recent work on focus fusion showing that creation of heavier elements by nuclear fusion of light elements takes place around high power electric discharges,
The stellar core theory of heavy element creation can never be tested, no-one can poke around a star’s core to see if its true, also it seems every year the standard model of a star takes a clobbering from observations, that semsic test of the sun and its outer layer heat convection mechanism that came up negative was a heavy blow. Meanwhile nuclear fusion via electric arc discharge has been evidenced and the science has been peer reviewed and published, e.g. in physics of plasma journal and commended by top brass physics professors.
But when I point this out to Leif he just reverts to his Sydney Chapman training – he dismisses it out of hand. All the empirical evidence, peer reviews and official recognition from the highest science authorities are worth nil as far as Leif is concerned. And when Leif says no, Ant obeys.
It’s going to be interesting watching Leif’s and WUWT’s response to this topic over the next few months. Focus fusion research is now advancing fast – i.e. more powerful plasmoids are being created every year, allowing heavier elements to be created by nuclear fusion within them. It might be that every other science blog picks up the story before WUWT, or WUWT might even never acknowledge one of the greatest achievements of science.
In the early 1960’s I, along with about two hundred other people, watched a globe of ball lightning descend from the sky, traverse a field hockey field, kill one of the players, float back up into the sky, and then dissipate.
The official explanation was that the player had “suffered a rare form of heart attack”, and the ball of lightning reported by the hundreds of witnesses was “an example of mass hysteria”.
I think we call that form of “science” group think. Kinda like “global warming”.
Zeke says: “If it is ball lightning, why is he standing there in the room with it?”
You can’t see it, but under his clothing, he’s wearing a Faraday cup, Zeke.
My mother once saw ball lightning during a storm. I believe she said it floated up out of their wood stove and then left the kitchen via a closed window. They later found a tiny pinhole in the glass at the exit point.
There are many accounts on the Internerd of ball lightning. I recall a case where green or blue ball lightning erupted from a light fixture and either struck or passed near the home owner. He later developed a form of cancer and died.
Capital-S “Skeptics” continue to “debunk” and dismiss whatever they can’t fit into their mental; boxes. An example of their treatment of ball lightning, by “Skeptico,” can be found at http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4192 It concludes
From meemoe_uk on August 10, 2013 at 7:17 pm:
Now when I got emailed for my real name for a WUWT submission, I just took it as a prerequisite and replied. Didn’t get published, got no reason for it.
And moved on. That’s what starting writers should expect. And since there are no manuscripts to mail back, you don’t get the form rejection letter. Next time I felt like submitting, I wrote something much better, it got accepted.
That’s just how it goes.
Did I miss something? Was I also to have thought I was being censored and persecuted since I wasn’t published?
Did I miss something? Was I also to have thought I was being censored and persecuted since I wasn’t published?
Did you check to see if your subject was on a blacklist? Mine was. I expect yours wasn’t. When the next big step forward is announced from the FF community I’ll have another go at submitting an article on it.
As it happens the Washington Post has a blog referring to the “myth of ball lightning”, which it–naturally–accompanies with a link to video of ball lightning. (I do remember reading long ago that ball lightning is a myth.)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/08/07/ten-myths-about-summer-weather/?Post+generic=%3Ftid%3Dsm_twitter_washingtonpost
I heard this account several times from my grandad, and my dad said that his uncles confirmed the incident.
When my paternal grandad was about 14, which puts it around 1890, he was growing up on the family farm near Adrian, Michigan. A thunderstorm had come and gone, and the windows were open again. The family were having lunch around the big kitchen table and a ball of lightning came in through the screen window. (Here gramps would hold his hands so as to describe a sphere eight or nine inches across.) Everyone sat speechless as the ball floated right across the table lengthwise, just above the height of their heads while seated. It went in a straight line at about a normal walking pace, glowing yellow-orange and hissing faintly.
Having crossed the table, it was headed toward the door. Stevie, who was six and sat at a corner of the table nearest the door, suddenly jumped out of his chair and ran past the ball. He opened the door wide and the ball sailed on through, having never swerved an inch left or right, up or down. Gramps saw it as slowing as it approached the door, but everyone else said no, its speed stayed as steady as its course. Great-grandad said its color was turning more orange as it went, but gramps had not noticed that. Anyway the ball floated through, and as it crossed the threshold Stevie slammed the door. There were two booms, so close together they were almost one. The second was the familiar boom of the door slamming shut; the first boom sounded like a shotgun. Nobody had yet found their tongue.
The door had been recently whitewashed; it now had a circular darkened area where the ball had blown up, darkest in the center and shading to white. There was a perfectly round hole in the copper window-screen, with perfectly clean edges. Someone suggested there should be hardened droplets of molten copper on the sill and floor below the hole, but they could find none.
There was no electricity; the family had only recently gotten their first kerosene lantern, and hadn’t yet retired their candle-dipping apparatus. Ball lightning was not unheard of in the region; Grandad had heard of it, and so was able to put a name to it; but none of them had ever seen ball lightning before, and my grandad never again saw any, nor ever heard of any more sightings by anyone in his family.
Some puzzles, beyond the obvious question of “What the heck is ball lightning?”:
1. Where did the copper go to, from the window-screen? If it was melted shouldn’t there have been solidified droplets beneath? If it vaporized shouldn’t there have been a sudden cloud of vapor expelled as the ball penetrated the window, and a sound much like a big drop of water would make if you dropped it onto a yellow-hot surface so that it instantly vaporized? Yet Gramps was certain the ball came through the screen as quietly as if there was nothing there; that it made a steady, faint hiss the whole time and there was no bigger hiss as it came through. Could the copper have been turned not into vapor but into plazma, and made no sound because it was all incorporated into the plazma ball?
2. Why such a straight path? Just try launching bubbles or a neutral-boyancy helium balloon, and getting any of them to take a straight path across a large room, or to stay at a constant height. There might or might not have been a light breeze crossing the room, in the windows on one end and out the windows on the other end; but gramps was sure there wasn’t a stiff breeze blowing through. He felt as he watched the lightning ball that its straight course was uncanny, and I believe he wouldn’t have felt it uncanny if there’d been a steady air current to explain it.
Star Craving Engineer: I heard very similar accounts from my grandmothers, who had both seen a ball lighting invade their homes. One of those events was a family lunch, so many people saw it and could confirm it was not a halucination; plus, they saw a small hole in the glass where it entered. In that event, the ball’s path was not straight; they said it was bobbing up and down as it passed.
Regarding the missing copper effect: I think it was burnt away. It did not have to be vaporized. Thin copper wires, when heated a few hundred degrees above melting point, will quickly burn in air. You could say it probably “went up in smoke”.
Why a straight path? While not all witnesses of ball lightning mention a straight path, many do, and that suggests very strongly that ball lightning is a field effect, rather than a thing, so it does not care about the breeze across the room. It seems to be a very large-scale effect involving the earth and the clouds above that somehow focuses a lot of energy on one spot, and that spot can drift. The focus can be well defined or not (the accounts of the size vary), and the energy can vary in magnitude and density, causing visible effects in air ranging from a faint glow to hot plasma. In solids, it may or may not cause any damage as it passes through them. Reported effecs range from nothing to violent explosions.
I have only vague intuition about the causes and possible mechanisms, but for a simple mechanical analogy, consider percutaneous lithotripsy:
http://img.tfd.com/mk/L/X2604-L-25.png
The field (in this case, the sound pressure field) has such a shape that it is not seen or felt anywhere except very near its focal point. You can sweep the field across the body and see the cavitation zone move, leaving destruction in its path, on a trajectory that is controlled by the position of the transducer outside the body. If your visible world is small and you can only see an even smaller part of it where the field is most intense but you are unaware of the transducer outside and of the general shape of the field even in the proximity of the small volume where it causes visible effects, it is easy to convince yourself that you see “something that moves”. But if it is indeed a field effect, then trying to reproduce that “something” in the lab will seem a bit naïve, don’t you think?