Ball Lightning Created In the Lab 190
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.
Slashdotted Video? (Score:5, Informative)
Is ball lightning supposed to bounce around the ground like that? I thought it floated. 'Course, I could be mistaken.
- Greg
Re:Slashdotted Video? (Score:4, Informative)
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In this case a conducting plasma ball will move along the lines of resulting electric field, but because earth landscape is not flat, it will move in rather strange trajectories.
Re:Slashdotted Video? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Slashdotted Video? (Score:4, Funny)
Wouldn't it be a great way to signal excessive load on a server? Except that then microsoft would embrace and extend the idea with ballMer lightning, which also throws chairs at you if it spots license irregularities.
Re:Slashdotted Video? (Score:5, Funny)
The Boxen (Score:5, Funny)
I have squandered my existence on some packets full of numbers such are data files
All porn and jest
Still the NAT hears what it wants to hear
and access denies the rest
Oh yes, access denies the rest
In the NOC there stands a boxen
and a server by its trade
and it carries the reminders
of every luser guest that logged on
and downloaded till it cried out
in its full Slashdotted shame
"My CPU is burning, but the hard drive still remains"
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
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Re:Slashdotted Video? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Slashdotted Video? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Slashdotted Video? (Score:5, Interesting)
It dissipated shortly after he got out, and he went straight to the lakeside bar to get a drink, touched the proffered glass, and it exploded. Other than that and a healthy dose of 'holy fuck', he had no ill effects.
Re:Slashdotted Video? (Score:5, Funny)
That's not ball lightening, that's just shrinkage. Happens to men when they're swimming all the time. Usually not when the water's in the eighties though.
Yeah, that's typical too.
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Re:Slashdotted Video? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not being too conversant with electromagnetism I couldn't say whether this was because he represented an electrical 'hot spot' on the water or just that he was so freaked he thought it was following him.
It was, so far as he could tell, about a foot across.
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Nobody says this *is* ball lightning (Score:2)
Just because someone in a lab makes a ball of feathers that quacks does not mean that they have made a duck!
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If it passes the duck test [wikipedia.org], it would be pretty reasonable to call it a duck, even if it were a cygnet that merely resembled an ugly young duck.
- Greg
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ball lightening (Score:2)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
FalconSandals (Score:2)
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Fascinating (Score:5, Interesting)
It will be interesting to read more research on the subject when it becomes available.
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Re:Fascinating (Score:4, Funny)
Just don't tell me when they create a Lord of the Pit, the U.S. has a hard enough time preserving marshland's as it is.
Interesting conversion (Score:3, Funny)
True. An interesting side effect of all of this is that we now know that 3 red mana = 140 amps.
Hmm? Something is missing (Score:3, Interesting)
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Try "explanation".
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St. Elmo's fire (Score:2)
He said nothing about seeing Emilio Estevez on the fence.
How about Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore or any of the others?
FalconMod above offtopic astroturf (Score:2)
Having seen 'ball lightning'... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Perhaps because these are tiny lab expirment ones, a real one created with an actual lightning might indeed look quite different. The substance where a real one comes from is normally not a pure silicon based thing.
But I fear this is one of these things that are difficult to recreate accu
Re:Having seen 'ball lightning'... (Score:5, Insightful)
As I can see in the video, their fireballs move along equipotential curves, i.e. along the lines with the equal electric field. But the electric charge of concrete floor is almost zero, so ball lightning doesn't float too high. In a real thunderstorm there may be potential differenced in ranges of thousand volts per meter.
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http://www.venganza.org/ [venganza.org]
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Hopefully we'll soon see an interesting application of this phenomenon too! (Let's just hope the military don't put it to some nasty use)
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It could still be that with a different chemical composition the balls would behave in a different way, and lightening isn't known for being picky about where it hits. Limestone, granite or trees. - Doesn't really matter.
Maybe analyzing the soil and comparing it to the nuances of the reports of ball lightening would yield som
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Bigger! Like a rabbit! (Score:1)
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I've seen ball lightening (Score:2, Funny)
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Did that in a fireplace (Score:4, Interesting)
Agrees well with some observations (Score:1, Interesting)
Arc welding (Score:3, Interesting)
Very simple (Score:1)
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That was my thought too - all the 'balls' dropped straight to the ground and skittled along it. Behavior perfectly consistent with sparks such as those produced by a welder - and not at all consistent with that of ball lightning which is almost always described as 'floating'.
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We used to do that in electronics class in high school. We'd kill power at the breaker panel, and since all the workbenches had multiple A.C. outlets we'd put solder in all of them. When the instructor came in he'd notice the power was off and go flip the breaker. *POW* there'd be a room-filling flash of blue-white light and there would be a dozen or more hot white balls dancing across
Occupational health and safety? (Score:2, Insightful)
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on the side note of the science involved, I don't think these things would float if they had more anergy. They seem to drop at 10m/s/s ish, regardless of size (tho admittedly they don't vary that much).
I heard one account of a b
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Big deal (Score:1, Offtopic)
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...Only different (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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When I was young my Mum saw ball lightning and described it, it flew across the backyard and zeroed in on our power board. The next morning I had a look and there were no scorch marks on the board, very odd.
I always thought the best possibility f
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this is NOT it... (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
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I want names (Score:5, Insightful)
I want their names -- show me a scientist who would publicly postulate this.
Re:I want names (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/
The same guy also talks about ball lightning due to neutrinos here:
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=88edu
Pace VanDevender (Score:3, Informative)
inventing things out of order (Score:5, Funny)
Re:inventing things out of order (Score:5, Funny)
Bloody type one decks
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Magic missile was invented LONG ago man, where you been?
Here [researchpress.co.uk] is one of the earliest versions.
How big is it? (Score:1)
I'm pretty sure (Score:4, Informative)
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He thinks he can "know [they're] not real" by... failing to find them? Well, a lot of people go from science into entertainment these days.
Old hat? (Score:2)
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Re:Old hat? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmmmm... (Score:1)
Still not right (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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8 seconds (Score:2)
Your observation and others too (Score:2)
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Would you like me to draw a picture for you?
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Right. You were in the next room. In bed. You had no personal experience with the ball lightning. So I assume it would be difficult for you to draw a picture.
On a similar note, stories abound wherein people are visited by ghosts. Many times these stories begin with "I was lying in bed, almost asleep, when all of a sudden a figure appeared..." Very rarely do they begin with, "I was in t
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Yea. I'd imagine the temptation to touch it would be enormous. So maybe it was better I hadn't seen it
right... (Score:3, Insightful)
Dude! (Score:1)
This has been done for over 2 decades already (Score:4, Informative)
Check it out at here [prometheus2.net] .
Not Ball Lighting (Score:2)
The next obvious step (Score:3, Funny)
Flight EA539 (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Previous Examples of Lab-Created Ball Lightning (Score:2)
"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 [newscientist.com] 07 Jun
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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.
America (Score:3, Informative)