Jann O'Connor posted, on 21/8/2002
I found this very interesting.
Scientists explain Indian 'monster'
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/08/20/1029114105359.html
I was talking to a man tonight about this
article and he told me that he had once seen ball lightning. He was
nine years old, in the country in his grandmother's lounge room when suddenly
a round sparkly ball came through
the window, stopped for a moment in the middle
of the room, went bang and disappeared leaving only a residual smell of ozone.
How common is ball lightning? I have
never seen it in my lifetime.
Wolfie respondedPodargus added:My father related a similar story to me. [or was it mum?]
One day, ball lightning came through the front door and passed right through the house and out the back door.
The house was left with the smell of sulphur.
A smell's not something I've often heard with these stories.
My wife and one of her friends saw it near Nowra many moons ago. Her description was much the same as above, except it was outside. IIRC NS had some info on it about a year ago.
Like you I have never seen it and I am probably a deal older, and have spent a lot of time outdoors in storms (incompetence?).
My understanding is
that it is probably uncommon, but like 20 metre snakes is not often/ever seen
by someone who knows what they are looking at.
Owen Veenstra contributed:Ray added:Don't know if this helps, but I seem to recall a Nature article about 9 years ago where Japanese researchers claim to have reproduced ball lightning within a laboratory. From memory, they used extremely powerful (but localised) magnetic
fields to control plasma. Their were a number of photos demonstrating the "ball lightning" moving through physical objects (such as asbestos screens) seemingly without any resistance; again, from memory, I don't believe that the article indicated any physical damage to the objects occurred.
Yes Jann, interesting.Don't quote me, but I think a similar phenomenon known in Australia was called Minmin by Aborigine pre-European dispersal.
There are presently unexplained spikes of lightning, seen only from above Earth's clouds, which appears to discharge outward into space.
Chris Forbes-Ewan wrote:
I haven't seen a definitive reply to this message, so I have enclosed a New Scientist article about ball lightning (below my signature block). In summary, there have been 'around 10,000 sightings over the past few decades'.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991720
Ball lightning scientists remain in the dark
13:42 20 December 01 Hazel Muir
Ball lighting is still baffling, scientists admit in a new report. They think the wisdom of more than 10 fields of science will be needed to explain the bizarre effect.
Glowing spheres of ball lightning float above the ground for up to a minute, usually when thunderstorms are nearby. Eyewitness reports have often been dismissed as fantasy, but with around 10,000 sightings over the past few decades, scientists are now convinced that it really exists.
A new report from the UK's Royal Society gathers many previously unpublished sightings of ball lightning. One describes how a luminous ball left a hole the size of a basketball in a screen door as it entered a house in Oregon, then navigated down to the basement and wrecked an old mangle. In another, an 80-centimetre glowing blob bounced on a Russian teacher's head more than 20 times before vanishing.
But explaining the reports is extremely tricky. Ball lightning can shine as brightly as a 100-watt light bulb, but has no obvious power supply. It does not radiate heat, yet it can melt glass when it floats into windows.
A leading theory suggests that ball lightning forms when a lightning strike vaporises silica in soil. The silicon vapour condenses into a fine dust that is bound together by electrical charges into a floating ball, which would oxidise and glow (New Scientist magazine, 8 April 2000).
"I am confident at this stage that the answer lies in the general direction of chemical reactions with very finely distributed particles," says John Abrahamson, a chemical engineer at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Another possibility is that air ionised by lightning could bind with water to create a hot ball of plasma with a cool water-and-ion coat.
But the new report says that none of the current theories tells the whole story. Ball lightning is probably the product of a family of different processes. Lab simulations of these processes can make mini ball lightning, but it is far smaller than natural versions and does not live nearly as long.
"It is important to try and understand these things," says David Turner, a retired physical chemist in Maryland who has studied ball lightning for a decade. But he adds that diverse fields of science, from maser physics to inorganic chemistry, may be required to explain it.
Turner thinks ball lightning might cause the spooky movement of objects blamed on "poltergeists". Abrahamson adds that similar chemical processes could also account for spontaneous human combustion, rare cases of people inexplicably bursting into flames.
"This is circumstantial only, but the charring of human limbs seen in a number of ball lightning cases are very suggestive that this mechanism may also have occurred where people have had limbs combusted," says Abrahamson.
Scientists think that if they can understand ball lightning fully and make it in the lab, it might provide a new way to contain high-temperature reactions that are useful to industry.
Journal reference: Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society A (vol 360)
13:42 20 December 01
Gerald Cairnes mused:
What intrigues me about these sightings or more specifically the "ball" itself is that if it is a plasma which is about the only rational description which I can think of how does it manage to last more than a nanosecond in unconfined conditions. If these balls are plasma and do have a duration of seconds to minutes this would seem to indicate a physical property about which we are ignorant and if that be the case there in lies a potential for a simpler and more economical means of fusion containment. DIY fusion reactors and "free" electricity, wow!Zero Sum added:Just thinking aloud.
There are a few problems..
We have supposedly reliable reported that one of these things can go through (and vaporise) a metal flyscreen. At the same time they have been reported to touch people without harming them. Can this be the same phenomena?
I've also heard a first hand story (so you get it third hand) of min-min lights following a group of people. Staying a constant distance (about 30 feet) away. Every time somebody tried to approach it, it receded at whatever velocity required. When they moved off it followed them again, maintaining separation. I confirmed the story with another member of the group. Identical in all repects.
I've heard a first hand report of one with a human face.
Given the number of different incompatible properties being ascribed to these phenomena, I have to say that I doubt the existence of a single rational explanation.
I know I would like to see something like this.
Wolfie supplied the following link to a display of "ball lightning" using a microwave.
https://www.angelfire.com/electronic/cwillis/microwave.html
Editor's note of warning:
We strongly
advise you do not try this at home unless you are CERTAIN you know what you
are doing!
Concerning Spontaneous Human Combustion, Jim Edwards cautioned:Wolfie added:I don't think so. In 'spontaneous' human combustion people do not "burst
into flames", they burn slowly, usually when their clothes are ignited by an
external source, with the combustion fuelled by fats in the flesh and marrow
in the bones. There was a doco on this subject on SBS a few years ago which
was able to account for every case of SHC they investigated. I do not
recall any mention of ball lightning. This seems to be a case of using one
inexplicable phenomenon to explain another.
When Gerald Cairns wrote:
> > Hi Folks,
> What intrigues me about these sightings or more specifically the "ball" itself is that if it is a plasma which is about the only rational description which I can think of how does it manage to last more than a nanosecond in unconfined conditions. If these balls are plasma and do have a duration of seconds to minutes this would seem to indicate a physical property about which we are ignorant and if that be the case there in lies a potential for a simpler and more economical means of fusion containment. DIY fusion reactors and "free" electricity, wow! > > Just thinking aloud.
An interesting thought
too. It’s a point, how and why do these balls remain together for such a
long time.
I recall the two mentioned on the doco.
One which went through a persons house [via the closed window, a Japanese scientist thinks that although the object appeared to go straight through the solid window, it probably was two separate balls... where the energy [microwave style] formed a new ball on the inside of the window. the ball went outside the house and travelled along a fence [slowly] in the street. where it eventually exploded.
the other ball concerned a crew of airforce men in a plane, the gunners window went purple and he was unable to see out of it. He called the captain and requested that he leave the area since he was terrified and then the ball went inside the plane and bobbed along the inside, exiting through the rear.
this second story is
not unlike the one about the scientists onboard the jet.
On 11/3/2003, Paul Williams wrote, in reply to a question from Peter Macinnis:
> QUESTION:No references sadly. I remember that a NZ scientist was recently doing a lot of research - there was a Japanese physicist making ball lightning in his Lab. by 'torturing' rocks a couple of years ago. I'll look through my million bookmarks tomorrow.
> After attempting to define "magnetic field" without mentioning "lines of
> force" or any other fictions, I fielded a query about "ball lightening" --
> I think the querent's problem may have been eased by using the spelling
> "ball lightning", but does anybody know a really good source on this topic
> that is suitable for lay readers, and does not slip off into
> black-helicopter-land?
>
Anecdote: I saw ball lightning in Bali in 1976 - two days before a massive earthquake...
and in a later post:
It seems to me that there may be different processes involved in the formation of what is collectively known as ball lightning.
Pre earthquake strata stress. Hydrological movement?
Ball lightning associated with violent electrical storms.
Can't find the Japanese research to do with rock strata stress.
Regards
Paul
Some of the references in this PDF may be useful:
http://www.tuvpo.com/hydA.pdf
The Ball Lighning Page:
http://www.eskimo.com/~billb/tesla/ballgtn.html
"Recent work on ball lightning (a long-lived luminous object seen sometimes during thunderstorms)-
(a) A theory was published in Nature in 2000 explaining ball lightning as a collection of nanospheres of metal, resulting from a lightning strike on soil. The fine particles gradually oxidise in the air, and radiate over a lifetime of seconds or minutes. This theory was elaborated and extended to strikes on metal structures in 2002, in Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. A Lond.. We are currently testing the theory in the laboratory."
http://www.cape.canterbury.ac.nz/people/ja/ja.htm
This article states that ball lightning is only seen during thunderstorms. The ball lightning I observed came out of a clear sky. I do not know if there were thunderstorms over the horizon.
http://physicsweb.org/article/news/4/2/3/1
Ball Lightning - metallic nano particles:
http://physicsweb.org/article/world/15/4/5/1
