New Explanation for Ball Lightning

[Kenny Drake]

I noticed this interesting article while doing my daily browsing, and I thought I would share it:

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25166/
Technology Review by MIT

Nothing exciting at all, apparently ball lightning is nothing more than a figment of our imaginations.

 

[Steve Elzinga]

Many years ago lightning struck three large hemlock trees outside our cabin in the woods. A large glowing orange ball formed inside the cabin on the second floor and drifted down the stairs and into the middle of the room before dissipating. There was someone sleeping on a bunk next to the stairs and they woke up thinking someone had kicked them in the head. He had a partial dental plate that he immediately spit out and he stated he had a feeling and taste in his mouth like he had put a nine volt battery in it. The entire interior of the cabin reflected the orange light and it looked like something out of a Star Trek movie. This was witnessed by five people and they all saw the same thing. I think they need to revisit their research.

 

[JSchumacher]

Interesting theory, but there are several pictures and videos out there now of this phenomenon. Could be doctored, yes, but with so many eye witness reports, I think logically you can't assume they all are doctored and that real accounts are just hallucinations.
In fact my dad used to do weather photography. He had a personal experience with it and even got pictures. They are terribly over exposed due to the brightness, and it looks more like a spiny amoeba, but I believe to they naked eye it could appear as a sphere, like it did to him.
I'm not discounting the magnetic affects they discuss in the article, only saying that ball lightning cannot solely be attributed to it.
Just my 2 pennies of course!

 

[Jeff Wright]

This may be of interest

Tempest in a teacup: Physicists make breakthrough in creating turbulence

Turbulence is all around us. It's in the swirl of coffee and milk in a latte, unfurling along the wings of airplanes and the sides of cars, churning the blood in your heart after the valve snaps closed. Yet we still don't fully grasp all of its rules.

phys.org

A group of University of Chicago scientists, however, have pioneered a way to create contained turbulence in a tank of water. They use a ring of jets to blow loops until an isolated "ball" of turbulence forms and lingers.

My guess is that ball lightning is such that a regular stroke has to hit such-and-such a substance just so----to produce such an effect.

 

[Jeff Wright]

Some discussion at a responsible skeptic site (the old BAD ASTRONOMY forum of Plait)

Ball lightning - Cosmoquest Forum

How plausible is the meme of ball lightning? Is it pseudoscience?

forum.cosmoquest.org

 

[William Monfredo]

I don't have original video of electrical plasma; however, these Canadians seem to, and they're calling it ball lightning.

 

[Randy Zipser]

A recent article about "ball lightning" appeared in Chemical & Engineering News on April 15, 2024 (please see link below).

Dr. Martin A. Uman at the University of Florida, a world-renowned expert in lightning, has performed lightning experiments to see if the "ball lightning" phenomenon could be reproduced "in the lab," but the results were not conclusive. His results are described in this article.

What is ball lightning, a reality or myth?

 

[Dan Robinson]

Back in the early days of my web site in the late 1990s, I had a form for people to report ball lightning sightings. Nearly all of them were describing obvious power line arcing events, which this Canadian case quite certainly is.

I have yet to see a true “ball lightning” event, at least anything like the classical descriptions of it. The closest I have is this:

I don’t know exactly what that is, but I think it may simply be a channel bead-out segment that lingers longer than the others. I have many videos of these beading segments:

Bead Lightning Photo Gallery by Dan Robinson

Stock photography of bead lightning thunderstorm phenomenon.

stormhighway.com

This latest Canadian video really shows the sad state of information dissemination when such an obvious, ordinary power line arc is getting such a wildly viral misidentification by big name media outlets.

 

[Boris Konon]

You would think w/ decades of video in and around tstms globally, and many, many storm chasers in and around the most frequent and intense tstms on the planet found in the U.S., there would have been something convincing by now. But we have yet to see anything, so until proven otherwise, it does not exist. The null hypothesis is in effect.

And why is it always assumed ball lightning? There can and are many other explanations out there, but that's the intellectual laziness that exists today w/ too many and the MSM. It's like when so many things in the sky are 'unexplained,' it's always ALIENS! Why not ghosts?, time travelers?, interdimensional beings? Even within the fantasy or pseudoscience realm, social aspects of our folklore override and are assumed by default. It just goes to show how illogical and irrational thinking , never mind the lack of skepticism, rears its ugly hear time and time again. Ball lighting is no different.

The entire ball lightning phenomena is something carried from anecdotal stories going back centuries, and just carry on in pop culture through inertia. This is basically meaningless as to knowing for a fact ball lightning actually exists. But it doesn’t stop the MSM from going down this route, as it all about content, truth and facts do not matter.

And the person explaining ball lighting in the video automatically assumes b/c we are supposed to see more tstms as time goes on (taking the climate change route, of course), we could see more. Do you see how ridiculous this is? We don't know even if ball lighting exists as an entity, never mind what conditions are needed for it, so how can one possibility go from that to "more tstms in the future means more ball lighting?" This is idiotic and shows the sorry state of how too many ppl think and act these days.

And the idea of a "ball" or "bundle" of "energy" is flawed. This is what entertainment and fictional stories have taught us. "Ball of energy" shows up commonly in our literary works -- a coherent focused area "floating" along (think Star Trek), but this is not reality.

 

[John Farley]

I knew some people who had a very similar experience to what Steve describes above. Additionally, I may have indirectly witnessed it myself once. My dad and I were sitting in the garage, watching an intense storm out the west-facing garage door. There was a brilliant flash of lightning behind us, to the southeast, followed by a steady orange glow from the northeast, which lasted a few seconds and ended with a crash of thunder. Followed a second or two later by another crash of thunder from the flash to the southeast. I thought ball lightning was the most likely explanation for the steady orange glow, which was quite different in color from the rest of the lightning.

I don't know for sure if ball lightning is real or exactly what it is, but there has to be something that people have been seeing for centuries, well before power lines existed.

 

[James K]

What John Farley mentioned made me remember something (probably similar) that I directly witnessed years ago.
I was watching a somewhat-intense thunderstorm out my (north facing) bedroom window, This one was putting off a fairly good lightning show including CG's - some of them fairly close. Wasn't much rain coming down with it though.

One CG struck something straight ahead in the view-line, and there was an orange glow that lasted a few seconds then faded out. Thunder was a loud bang(not rumbling thunder) that came almost immediately after the strike, as it wasn't that far away (could almost feel the sound shockwave).
The was clearly visible even being afternoon (cloudy ofcourse but not dark/thick clouds - this wasn't a big storm). That would have been impressive at night.

I watched that spot directly for a few minutes to see if a fire would break out, but it didn't. Then the rain picked up & there wasn't as much lightning.

 

[Warren Faidley]

Ball lightning was studied extensively by the University of Vulgeria in the late 1990's and the cause was determined to be "pants zippers made of conductive metal."