Ball lightning
Ball lightning is a rare and unexplained phenomenon described as luminescent, spherical objects that vary from pea-sized to several meters in diameter.
Although laboratory experiments have produced effects that are visually similar to reports of ball lightning, how these relate to the supposed phenomenon remains unclear.
Ball lightning has been described as transparent, translucent, multicolored, evenly lit, radiating flames, filaments or sparks, with shapes that vary between spheres, ovals, tear-drops, rods, or disks.
[20] Physicist Emeritus Professor Brian Tanner and historian Giles Gasper of Durham University identified the chronicle entry as probably describing ball lightning, and noted its similarity to other accounts: Gervase's description of a white substance coming out of the dark cloud, falling as a spinning fiery sphere and then having some horizontal motion is very similar to historic and contemporary descriptions of ball lightning ...
The ball of fire allegedly smashed the pews and many windows, and filled the church with a foul sulphurous odour and dark, thick smoke.
[2] In December 1726, a number of British newspapers printed an extract of a letter from John Howell of the sloop Catherine and Mary: As we were coming thro' the Gulf of Florida on 29th of August, a large ball of fire fell from the Element and split our mast in Ten Thousand Pieces, if it were possible; split our Main Beam, also Three Planks of the Side, Under Water, and Three of the Deck; killed one man, another had his Hand carried of [sic], and had it not been for the violent rains, our Sails would have been of a Blast of Fire.
[3]A 1753 report recounts lethal ball lightning when professor Georg Richmann of Saint Petersburg, Russia, constructed a kite-flying apparatus similar to Benjamin Franklin's proposal a year earlier.
[23] An English journal reported that during an 1809 storm, three "balls of fire" appeared and "attacked" the British ship HMS Warren Hastings.
M. Colon, Vice-President of the Geological Society of Paris, saw a ball of lightning descend slowly from the sky along the bark of a poplar tree; as soon as it touched the earth it bounced up again, and disappeared without exploding.
This ball rolled across without doing any harm to two women and a young man who were here; but on getting into an adjoining stable it exploded and killed a pig which happened to be shut up there, and which, knowing nothing about the wonders of thunder and lightning, dared to smell it in the most rude and unbecoming manner.
During the service there was a powerful thunderstorm, streaks of lightning flashed one after the other, and it seemed as if the peals of thunder would shake even the church and the whole world to its foundations.
[29]British occultist Aleister Crowley reported witnessing what he referred to as "globular electricity" during a thunderstorm on Lake Pasquaney[30] in New Hampshire, United States, in 1916.
As I looked at it, it exploded with a sharp report quite impossible to confuse with the continuous turmoil of the lightning, thunder and hail, or that of the lashed water and smashed wood which was creating a pandemonium outside the cottage.
In front of, above and around the new Hall of Engineering of the School of Mines, balls of fire played tag for half an hour, to the wonder and amazement of all who saw the display.
Some scientific groups, including the Max Planck Institute, have reportedly produced a ball lightning-type effect by discharging a high-voltage capacitor in a tank of water.
Some experiments describe covering the match with an inverted glass jar, which contains both the flame and the balls so that they do not damage the chamber walls.
[55] (A glass jar, however, eventually explodes rather than simply causing charred paint or melting metal, as happens to the inside of a microwave.
)[citation needed] Experiments by Eli Jerby and Vladimir Dikhtyar in Israel revealed that microwave plasma balls are made up of nanoparticles with an average radius of 25 nm (9.8×10−7 inches).
Two Brazilian scientists, Antonio Pavão and Gerson Paiva of the Federal University of Pernambuco[57] have reportedly consistently made small long-lasting balls using this method.
Several hypotheses have been advanced since the phenomenon was brought into the scientific realm by the English physician and electrical researcher William Snow Harris in 1843,[60] and French Academy scientist François Arago in 1855.
An experimental investigation of this effect, published in 2007, reported producing "luminous balls with lifetime in the order of seconds" by evaporating pure silicon with an electric arc.
[66] Matthew Francis has dubbed this the "dirt clod hypothesis", in which the spectrum of ball lightning shows that it shares chemistry with soil.
[72] In 2017, Researchers from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, proposed that the bright glow of lightning balls is created when microwaves become trapped inside a plasma bubble.
Microwaves trapped inside the ball continue to generate plasma for a moment to maintain the bright flashes described in observer accounts.
[citation needed] St. Elmo's fire arises when a sharp conductor, such as a ship's mast, amplifies the atmospheric electric field to breakdown.
Powell's kinetic theory calculation found that the ball size is set by the second Townsend coefficient (the mean free path of conduction electrons) near breakdown.
[75][76][77] It was suggested that a ball lightning is based on spherically symmetric nonlinear oscillations of charged particles in plasma – the analogue of a spatial Langmuir soliton.
It is suggested that bound states of radially oscillating charged particles with oppositely oriented spins – the analogue of Cooper pairs – can appear inside a ball lightning.
These plasmas appear to originate due to more than one set of weather and electrically charged conditions, the scientific rationale for which is incomplete or not fully understood.
[48] Fedosin presented a model in which charged ions are located inside the ball lightning, and electrons rotate in the shell, creating a magnetic field.
