Ball Lightning Caught On Video and Spectrograph 120
symbolset writes "Ball lightning has been reported for hundreds of years, and experimentally produced, but for the first time a natural will 'o wisp has been captured on video and amazingly, spectrograph, accidentally by researchers studying ordinary lightning."
Error in summary (Score:5, Informative)
I'd just like to note that a will o' the wisp [wikipedia.org] is not the same thing as ball lightning [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The latter may be responsible for the stories of the former basing fantasy on bits of unexplained fact, as is often the case with ancient legends, e.g., the Christian's god was probably a volcano. [youtube.com]
What about a Foo Fighter [wikipedia.org] or Saint Elmo's Fire [wikipedia.org]? One thing I find interesting is how many events can have a common cause. As is often the case in science, it's not a stretch to think such disparate things could someday be understood as a variation of "the same thing": A change in static electric charge.
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What about a Foo Fighter [wikipedia.org]
The nonsense word "foo" emerged in popular culture during the early 1930s, first being used by cartoonist Bill Holman who peppered his Smokey Stover fireman cartoon strips with "foo" signs and puns.
Kool.
Not off subject a bit. :}
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the Christian's god was probably a volcano.
I always thought it was a burning bush, aka an open oil spring somewhere in the desert.
Re:Error in summary (Score:4)
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And a great deal of trouble might have been prevented had the god in question had not granted the land between the Euphrates and the Red Sea to all 3 groups!
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To be fair, the land was not granted to the Christians who were promised an entirely new universe.
They certainly thought that they had a holy right to it, back when they decided to go and take it from the Muslims starting in 1095, spending the next 200 years trying to gain and maintain control of it.
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That's because they weren't paying attention when their leader told them to stay separate from the world's political affairs. Or more likely because they were greedy, power-hungry idiots using religion as a cover for their ambitions.
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That's because they weren't paying attention when their leader told them to stay separate from the world's political affairs. Or more likely because they were greedy, power-hungry idiots using religion as a cover for their ambitions.
To many words.
Christian suffices but Organised Religion covers it.
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the Christian's god was probably a volcano.
I always thought it was a burning bush, aka an open oil spring somewhere in the desert.
No, it was just a flashlight. The big question is: who's flashlight was it?
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Re:Error in summary (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Error in summary (Score:1)
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Re: Error in summary (Score:4, Insightful)
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Wow, the social justice brigade is really stretching it lately, ain't they?
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One day they'll discover the origin of "that's very fair of you" and implode in self-shame. I do look forward to it.
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Re: Error in summary (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, take care to avoid using the words "hysteria", "orchid", "seminar", "avocado", "mastodon", "manatee", "fundamental", or other words with similarly sexual etymologies around underage people.
Words come from places and take meanings and connotations that don't match their origins. Get over it.
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Most of those words are the "nicer" words that people were supposed to use, so as not to insult various people. See "euphemism".
The result is the "nicer" word just takes on the bad connotation and gets "ruined", as well as the old one.
The world goes through a cycle of this several times each generation, but it is futile.
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Of course not. Those are two entirely different cards. They aren't even the same color!
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I think it was meant to be metaphorical. That's the way I took it though. For some reason I seem to be more tuned into language and writing than most of the people I work with which is why "Needs to improve communications skills" rarelyshows up on my job reviews.
link to video? (Score:3)
can anybody find a link to the actual video? I followed the link in the summary but got to a series of other pages about the video, but not the video itself.
Re:link to video? (Score:5, Informative)
It's available here: http://physics.aps.org/articles/v7/5
Not much to see though.
Re:link to video? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's available here: http://physics.aps.org/article... [aps.org]
Not much to see though.
From the link, with my emphasis:
That is what Ping Yuan and co-workers from Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou, China, now report. They had set up spectrometers on the remote Qinghai Plateau of northwest China to investigate ordinary lightning, which is frequent in this region. During one late-evening thunderstorm in July 2012, they saw ball lightning appear just after a lightning strike about 900 meters from their apparatus and were able to record a spectrum and high-speed video footage of the ball.
(groan) ... seems there are publications much slower than /. - this was supposed to be news one year and a half ago.
Re:link to video? (Score:5, Insightful)
(groan) ... seems there are publications much slower than /. - this was supposed to be news one year and a half ago.
To be fair, ball lightning sightings and claims to have photographed it or caught it on video are quite frequent, with a very high rate of hoaxes or mistaking other phenomena for it. (Almost as bad as UFO sightings and "evidence.")
It wouldn't surprise me at all if a few extra months were added to the researchers' analysis and to the peer review just to substantiate that this is what it says it is, and all the analysis is correct. Ball lightning is just one of those things that so many people have claimed to see, and it seems odd that scientists have so much trouble catching evidence of natural occurrences... so when you finally think you've got it, you want to be sure.
Not saying it explains the whole delay, but maybe part of it.
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Ball lightning is just one of those things that so many people have claimed to see, and it seems odd that scientists have so much trouble catching evidence of natural occurrences... so when you finally think you've got it, you want to be sure.
Also on the speculative path... I reckon one must be a Chinese scientist to get out on field trips and actually do something with a (2 actually) spectrograph...
Seems their "westernized" counterparts are busy fighting for grants (i.e. survival) and organizing sneaker nets to smuggle scientific journals [slashdot.org]
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Sure, a Chinese scientists has so much less [wikipedia.org] to worry about when he publishes. (That's one damn chilling article about stuff still happening today, if you think through the implications.)
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There's very much relevance when some asshat suggests China has a better model of government (unless that was done sarcastically to highlight just how far we've fallen). There's a new trend on /. of love of totalitarian government, and it's a very dangerous idea. While US and Canadian scientists may struggle for funding, that's a far cry from fearing to publish research that could be somehow be taken as some sort of criticism of some government decision.
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There's very much relevance when some asshat suggests China has a better model of government (unless that was done sarcastically to highlight just how far we've fallen).
Umm... what to say? Let's examine the cited context:
on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @12:18AM, AthanasiusKircher wrote:
Ball lightning is just one of those things that so many people have claimed to see, and it seems odd that scientists have so much trouble catching evidence of natural occurrences...
I'm raising the question: how one would expect to catch evidence of natural occurrences without taking a field trip?
Would you suggest... modeling/replicating it in the lab? Like: "Give me the expensive toys otherwise you, the gov or funding body, don't love science"? Is then a wonder the western scientists struggle for budget?
There's a new trend on /. of love of totalitarian government, and it's a very dangerous idea. While US and Canadian scientists may struggle for funding, that's a far cry from fearing to publish research that could be somehow be taken as some sort of criticism of some government decision.
Mate, when I was a kid, the admission coming from an American of the fact the Russians in the former USSR were doing science was in
Re:link to video? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations. Science can not explain everything and is limited because it is created by humans. science didn't create humans, humans created science
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Religion is created by humans as well, but can *easily* 'explain' everything. I don't see how "created by humans" would be an inherently limiting factor.
BTW, I wasn't even saying that science can explain everything. I just think that one should not immediately resort to believing in the paranormal, just because there are things you can't immediately explain. That just means science isn't done yet.
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Science never denied the existence of ball lightning as a phenomenon, at least as described in your case (as opposed to the more, shall we say, embellished versions). What was (and remains) very unclear is the exact mechanism for its formation.
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To be fair, ball lightning sightings and claims to have photographed it or caught it on video are quite frequent, with a very high rate of hoaxes or mistaking other phenomena for it.
There appears to be no universally agreed definition of ball lightening. The reports/anecdotes vary greatly in the properties of the 'ball'. This is unfortunate because people who think they're talking about the same thing are talking about completely different things.
Re:link to video? (Score:5, Funny)
A low sperm count?
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Re:link to video? (Score:5, Informative)
It takes a long time to get stuff published. They had to take their results, form a paper, get people to analysis it and then it goes under peer review. For us to have all this information a little over a year out is actually quite good. Also, we know it's gone under review. It could still have bad information in it, but it's less likely.
Re:link to video? (Score:5, Interesting)
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That video is not helpful at all. Also the site is a blatant rip off of YouTube. I'm sure my computer just got owned.
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Warning: No video or pictures (Score:5, Informative)
Warning: This is another of those annoying website articles that describe a visually fascinating thing, but don't actually include any pictures or videos of said fascinating thing. Not even the the spectrograph, though that seems to be in the paper behind the paywall. The only picture is of some earlier lab-made ball lightning.
Re: (Score:1, Offtopic)
Warning: This is another of those annoying website articles that describe a visually fascinating thing, but don't actually include any pictures or videos of said fascinating thing. Not even the the spectrograph, though that seems to be in the paper behind the paywall. The only picture is of some earlier lab-made ball lightning.
How the heck does someone stutter using a keyboard?
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How the heck does someone stutter using a keyboard?
Emacs
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vi is easier just type a number before i and it stutters for you,
Possibly, but that would result in the entire sentence being repeated. VI mistakes usually have rather unique signatures :) :wq
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That is why I changed my vim bindings so I can always end with. :qed
Re:Warning: No video or pictures (Score:4, Informative)
It's in the first-linked article, directly underneath the picture.
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don't actually include any pictures or videos
Except for the picture...and video that I looked at when I visited.
Video (Score:5, Informative)
Ball lightning video [dailymail.co.uk]
(Don't complain that it is the Daily Mail, it worked better than the Puffington Hosts.)
Congrats guys! (Score:1)
You've caught up to Nikola Tesla...
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In the woods when I was at summer camp. Sometimes I wonder if ball lightning isn't simply an unlucky bird that got turned into instant plasma.
Maybe sometime, but I've been within five feet of a fair sized ball, and a vaporized bird would not be my first choice for an explanation. It melted the screen in my bedroom window.
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There's no need for a bird when you've got water vapor to work with.
Stories (Score:4, Interesting)
A grandmother of mine told a story about ball lighting that she saw in her kitchen. During a thunderstorm a bolt of lighting struck near her home and a bright hissing ball jumped out the phone, fell to the floor, moved a little ways across the floor leaving small scorch marks and vanished. This would have been the 1940's and the phone was probably a wall mounted rotary.
She was a sober and modest person with a sound mind throughout her life. I don't doubt the story.
Re:Stories (Score:5, Interesting)
It wasn't until the 1960s that scientists finally admitted that ball lightning actually existed. Since they couldn't explain how it could exist they declared it an 'old wives tale'.
My grandmother was terrified of lightning storms, and I used to sit with her during them growing up. She said that in the 1940s lightning hit the telephone pole outside and blew the telephone right off the wall, starting a fire in the wall she put out with a pan of water. Another time my dad, who would have been about 5 years old, and my grandfather were in the barn trying to calm the cattle. Looking out the window she saw a ball of lightning roll in one end of the barn and then out the other without lighting the mounds of straw and hay inside on fire. She could never abide thunderstorms after that.
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It would be fairer to say that there wasn't firm evidence for anything like "ball lightning" until that point. And the stuff that there's evidence for is still a tiny subset of ball lightning's supposed properties, most of which are more likely caused by phosphenes.
Re:Stories (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember reading stories like that as a kid. Never thought I'd see it. Then we moved to a neighborhood where it was common. Yes, common.
When there were dry thunderstorms, ball lightening would form above a tree down the street. One or two at a time, but dozens during a storm. About 30 to 60 cm in dia, they would drift down from the tree, changing colors until they popped.
My brother and I would watch it from behind a screen door during at least 3 different storms I can think of. Wild to think it was common enough to recognize the sound and say "The ball lightning is back, let's go watch!"
The great irony was we were living in family housing at a large research university. The never knew what they had happening on their own campus. I figured they wouldn't believe some kid.
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Does it hurt to be that stupid? If not, it should.
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There are photos extant from almost a century ago until today, and multiple videos (even some on YouTube). There are also a plethora of reliable observations over the years. Did you doubt the existence of giant squid before actual examples were caught?
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I was video taping with a digital camera and I believe I actually have ball lighting on tape... I viewed it several times trying to see if it wasn't some glare from lighting [obviously it was dark when the storm rolled thru] I am trying to determine where I should send a copy of the video, with details with elapsed time when they appear and then disappear.
It tough to know how large they are but they had a multi color glow, I would like to have a University or NOVA to have a look to see these things were jus
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Driving me crazy (Score:2)
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Not the first time by a long shot (Score:1, Flamebait)
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and [...] spectrograph
It's just another poorly worded summary.
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...all of which would have padded the summary out to a decent length and been highly informative!
Re:Not the first time by a long shot (Score:4, Informative)
My understanding is that it's the first time when we have sufficient review to conclude that this is real and is actually of the phenomenon it purports to document.
aduket (Score:1)
The stuff of streetfighter?
For. Fuck's. Sake. (Score:2)
Ball lightning caught on video
Wow! I sure would like to see that. Luckily this is the internet, where the magic of hypertext means information can be linked to quickly and easily.
Hmm? There's no link to the video in the summary, you say? Well that's not very good.
Hmm? There's not even a link to the video in the article? Slashtwats.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
Re:For. Fuck's. Sake. (Score:5, Informative)
It's embedded in the first article, on the right hand side, under the picture.
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Well, whoops :*
Ball Lightning and Will O' the Wisp (Score:2, Funny)
Are two VERY different things.
Will O' the Wisp is a B 0/1 Flying regenerating creature
Ball Lightning is an RRR 6/1 trample haste creature that has to be sacrificed at the end of turn.
Similar? really???
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haha, I want to, but I can't make fun of someone for just saying something I also know. :P
Interesting (Score:1)
What had happened was a bunch of thunderstorms had merged in to a supe