Ball Lightning LiptonCambell: Ball Lightning is an extremely rare form of lightning, where a sphere of lightning, often tiny, from a pea sized to a few meters in diameter, appears and hangs around after the lightning bolt for a few extra seconds. It's extremely rare, and has never been caught by scientists....until now... http://physics.aps.org/articles/v7/5 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning#Proposed_scientific_explanations It's interesting to find we're still discovering rare natural occurrences...  Corwin: Ball Lightning can also be caused by the static discharge created from wearing polyester underwear.    DawnGurl: What is truly fascinating is Nikolai Tesla managed to produce ball lightning in his lab many times and among many witnesses. Whats unfortunate is he never wrote down his experiments (his lab assistants did sometimes, but that's it) and to this day no one has been able to reproduce his ball lightning experiment. But it did happen! Source: A Man Out of Time by Margaret Cheney...a .biography of Tesla (Edited by DawnGurl) Corwin: Ball lightning was thought to be a myth for most of human history, as so few had witnessed it, and witness accounts are not substantial proof, even if witnessed by a scientist. But.... finally in 2012, a group of Chinese researchers studying a thunderstorm event with a wide array of equipment finally captured a ball-lightning event on video, as well as through a spectral-analyzer. The chemical composition of the ball-lightning matched that of soil... which seemed to confirm a theory first proposed by chemical engineer John Abrahamson in 2000: that ball lightning forms when a strike whisks up and scorches a small clod of dirt. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/nature/great-balls-of-fire/ Fascinating stuff, and possibly now we can really get to the bottom of this, and be able to reliably recreate these conditions artificially. | Science Chat Room Similar Conversations |
