Big hairy lightning balls

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

I have to admit that I was again disapointed by a recent column of Cecil’s.

The subject of this one is ball lightning:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/040917.html

The gist of this one is that when asked whether Ball Lightning exists, Cecil falls back on some dry physicist who spent twenty years on the subject and has “I dunno” for an answer.

Back in the day when I was a teenager I used to sit on the toilet reading Cecil’s first book and marvel at this great intellect that was both tremendously diligent, yet down and dirty.

You wanna know about Lava lamps? Cecil goes to the lava lamp factory? You want to know about killing cockroaches? Cecil gives you his own secret death recipe. You want to know if a duck quacks? Cecil ties up a duck puts it next to a concrete wall points a gun at it and says “Start yapping, Daffy.”

I remember the wholesale glee of the Mr. Wizard meets Dr. Demento mentality, that was Cecil. I would turn the page wondering if he was going to tell us how to make a nuke out of paper clips and duct tape.

Today though, somebody asks him about ball lightning, and he get a physics/history lesson that could have been delivered by by an 80 year old nun teaching her seventh grade class.

We’re talking about Ball Lightning, Baby!

As you should know Cecil, all the great ball lightning research, all the real bleeding edge stuff isn’t being done by phycisi… Phycisssis… physiciss… “fizzuhsists” (excuse me,) it’s being done by teenagers with microwave ovens.

After twenty years of research, the incomperably uncommitted paragon of science doesn’t know what it is of if it exists.

I say ask a teenager.

Ladies and gentleman, I give you ball lightning!:

http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/cwillis/microwave.html
All you need is a microwave, a candle, some foil, and a deadened survival instinct. As is clearly explained the hot ionized gas in the flame is an excellent conductor of electricity, in this case transmitted by microwaves, and once the reaction begins it is self-sustaining!

No physics degree necessargy.

You want bigger balls? No problem. Check out what Matt “the tube” Crowley has to say:

http://www.amasci.com/tesla/bigball2.html

Are you tired of keeping your ball lightning locked inside the microwave? Here’s how to set it free (and irradiate the neighborhood in the process)

http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/micro.html

Now it’s possible, Cecil that you may argue that these guys are not producing ball lightning with their plasmoid generators, but since neither you nor your go seem to know what ball lightning is, it would be hard for you to say that this isn’t it. The other thing is that if we’re going to get opinions from guys with PHDs we might as well get more than one. After neglecting the microwave suicide machine theory of ball lightning, I note that you also forgot to mention the Maser Soliton theory. The Maser Soliton theory says that lightning creates a “population inversion” of excited molecules or the Maser. Unless this Maser occurs in a wide open space the molecules beat each up creating the Soliton, which is a glowing sphere of electrical energy. “Glowing sphere of electrical energy” Hmmm. Sounds like ball lightning.

Drs John Abrahamson and James Dinniss from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand came up with the more pedestrian theory that lightning striking particulated silicon (anything sandlike,) would cause the silicon to combine with oxygen and carbon and burn, these particles would float together in a mass like a giant puffball:

“Lightning penetrates below the surface of the soil and heats a certain portion of it to quite high temperatures, so that it vaporises,” Dr Abrahamson told the BBC.

"And then, when the lightning strike has finished, the vapour is free to erupt, to appear above the ground in the form of a ball.

“The jet of hot gas will be very much the same as the jet coming out of one’s mouth when one blows a smoke ring - it forms a little re-circulating vortex and it’s quite self-contained.”

Really, Cece. How could you miss the microwaves? How could you? Goodness, Gracious Great balls of fire!

2

Re Cecil’s column on ball lightning, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this stuff. The circumstances were a little stranger, and the physics weirder, than I’ve ever heard of.

In 1960, I was 13 and hurricane Donna was ramping up to full force at my house in Westwood Lake in what was then the western-most suburb of Miami. It was mid-evening, and the family had a bedroom converted to a storm shelter, complete with burning candles and mattresses leaning against and covering the windows. As a kid, I was supposed to stay in our “shelter” the entire time, but when nature called, etc., I occasionally got out, and couldn’t help sneaking into a part of the house with glass sliders to look outside at my first hurricane.

On one of those occasions, I was staring across the narrow canal that bordered the rear of the property, and two lights flashed into existence, one right after the other, and started drifting to the left. They seemed to come from the transformer on a power pole just on the other side of the canal, maybe 75 feet from me, but at first I didn’t know that. I just saw two bright yellow globes, and I just stared at them trying to figure out what I was looking at.

Over a period of about 10 seconds, the globes appeared to drift a few feet to the left of the power pole, then turned to an orange color, and in succession, they disintegrated similar to what you see in a slowmo of a balloon popping - the globe opened up on one side, and the surface of the sphere pulled back to the opposite side, leaving sparkling tatters in its wake that died out like sparks from a campfire. The whole disintegration took two to three seconds.

Only after the disintegration, just after the globes had dimmed enough that I could see more detail on what was obviously a dark and stormy night, did I understand that the globes were not “lights”, and I immediately concluded I had just seen “St Elmo’s fire”. I was a science nut, and beside myself that I hadn’t realized what I’d been looking at from the start.

Here’s where it gets strange: The wind was blowing like crazy. We were in the midst of a huge, 600-mile-wide hurricane where the eye would come within 20-30 miles of us around midnight (as I recall). Nobody in his right mind was out driving around, or flying a plane. It was dark. Then these two lights appeared, and just hung there for several seconds, and slowly drifted around – in a gale!

Before I state some other impressions, some caveats: I was 13, I was excited, it was dark and rainy, and my depth perception probably wasn’t very good under those conditions (bright lights against black sky). It’s easy to make a case that I just saw some headlights and filled in the rest with a fertile imagination. I can’t rule it out either, but there are some other considerations I haven’t been able to dodge so easily.

Regarding the lack of wind effects, the impression I have of St Elmo’s fire is that it is ball lightning that comes off the masts and rigging on ships in storms, and drifts, i.e. it doesn’t flash into existence and go flinging off into the darkness with the wind. If there are any ship’s logs accounts to this effect, then my perception about some very strange physics would have company.

I distinctly remember the lights being at an elevation with the transformer on the power pole. Dade county is flat – our sea-level elevation was about 10 feet for several miles in all directions. I was definitely looking upward, and it’s hard to imagine a plane in the air in my line of sight.

I could have seen an atmospheric reflection of some sort, but it’s hard to imagine one so stable in a gale, or the light able to penetrate for much distance in that kind of rain. There was also the distinct impression I had, that as the globes were disintegrating, and were dimmer and had texture, that I was looking at something close by.

Other impressions: I was looking north. I believe the eye was to the southeast which would have made the wind come from the northeast. That means the globes seemed to drift slightly with the wind. I would guess they were about a foot in diameter, and when they disintegrated, they appeared to be hollow. I do not believe there was power to the transformer at the time, but don’t remember for sure. I believe the colors ranged from light yellow at the beginning to dark orange at the end – they were never white. Until they disintegrated, they appeared to be of stable, uniform color, and the change in color occured rapidly at the end of their lifespan.

This is a true account (I’m not a nut), but it’s from my memory after 44 years – take it with the appropriate grains of salt. However, if anyone else has a similar account, particularly involving the physics of wind-indifference, I’d be anxious to hear about it.

Bit

3

I recently read some accounts on ball lightning. Many accounts describe it floating through the air as a ball (or balls) often following extension cords in houses) or being attracted to other energized objects, like a TV - perhaps the static on the screen? (my own conjecture). Some even claim to have seen “glowing worms” (or filaments) inside the charged ball of lightning - perhaps like those plasma ball lamps you’ll find at the mall and such nowadays. There is much for us to learn about plasma…which ball lightning is believed to be.

As for the lights in all that wind, I assume this was a separate event based on your description. With the eye being so close to your area, could you have ben seeing an airplane’s wing lights from a Hurricane Hunter? I guess we hear of such trips before landfall, but perhaps they still fly into the eye to collect data and better study these storms during landfall, too?

Say, have they ever re-created ball lightning in the lab?
Just some thoughts to share…

  • Jinx
4

I saw a documentary a couple of years ago that showed scientists purportedly creating ball lightning in a lab. The balls fell to the floor and only lasted a fraction of a second. I’m not convinced they didn’t just get a spark of hot metal.

5

I’ve seen what I think was ball lightning. Flying through a monsoon thunderstorm on a flight from the Philippines to Hong Kong in 1993, we were in thick cloud, which was being lit every few seconds by lightning. Over the sea, about 10 miles from Kai Tak airport, I was looking from the rear of the plane out of a window the port side, and I saw a bright bluish-white ball of light appear below the wing, fly upwards, divert around the wingtip, and disappear above it. It lasted about 3 or 4 seconds.

6

If ball lightning were as common as the anecdotal ‘evidence’ suggests, there ought to be many thousands of clear photographs and pieces of video footage by now. The reports suggest that the phenomenon lasts for many seconds or even minutes at a time. But never within range of a camera or video recorder? Hmmm. The few photographs of ball lightning in books or on the web are hardly convincing. We have better photographs of ghosts, aliens, flying saucers and lake monsters than we do of ball lightning.

7

Correct me if I’m wrong, but there are a lot more people looking for proof of ghosts, aliens, flying saucers and lake monsters, and have been for quite some time.
Also, in that kind of weather, people’s first instinct is not to grab a camera, it’s to find shelter. As any kind of lightning is unpredictable, it’s not like you’re going to know when it’s going to hit or where.

8

Yes, it’s a shame I wasn’t carrying my non-existent camcorder with me permanently to capture those 3 seconds out of the ~1,166,832,000 seconds I have currently been alive for (during 1,166,832,997 of which, I haven’t been seeing ball lightning).

9

True, but there are lots of photos of ordinary lightning, taken by storm chasers, and we have clear video footage of other possibly even rarer events - meteorites faling ans so on. There are cameras everywhere now. We even expect to see video of unexpected one-off events, like terrorists flying planes into buildings, for example.

I agree there is no ‘belief system’ around ball lightning, like there is with ghosts and aliens, but there are still plenty of people who would like to photograph it.

10

There’s a thread on the JREF forum that discussed this topic. http://www.randi.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=20202

11

This is bogus reasoning, Cep. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

But maybe this helps explain it:

I was a mediocre photojournalist for a couple of years in my 20s. I had a camera with me much of the time, loaded and ready to go, pre-focused on infinity, stopped down to get as much depth-of-field as I thought I could muster (aperture priority). And I can’t begin to tell you how many shots I missed because something happened suddenly, and my first thought was NOT “shoot the picture.” Photojournalists who have been in the biz for a while (or at least those with better instincts than me) might think to raise their camera, but for the typical person out there…?

So imagine you’re in your living room watching football, and a yellow glowing globe rises out of your TV set. What’s the first thing you think of? Where’s my camera? Is that even the 2nd thing you think of? Then it’s gone. Drat, your digicamera would have booted in just another few seconds.

Here’s one for you. I’ve read anecdotally that the inside of a tornado funnel can be lit up with lightning. I fondly collect tornado videos. (Yeah, I know, I know.) It’s normally the usual collection of people shooting from a mile a way, and saying they need to get the hell out of there. But occasionally, someone gets pretty close (accidentally). But in all those hours of video, plus the occasional Nova, I have yet to see the shot of the inside of a funnel. Even with all those tornado chansers out there, and all the warning that people get, either on the Weather Channel or just looking out their window, and there hasn’t to my knowledge been a single attribution to a video shot inside a tornado, even posthumously. With all the nuts out there with video cameras filming every oddball thing in sight (check your local TV syndication schedule), there isn’t a single shot of the inside of a tornado. By your reasoning, tornadoes not only don’t have lightning in their funnels, they don’t even have insides. :wink:

Bit

12

So it would be OK with you, since we don’t know what dragons really are, if Cecil offered up their myriad myths and legends as a possible source of ball lightning?
Given that it’s the Straight Dope:

  • we do not know whether ball lightning exists;
  • we do know what plasmoid balls are;
  • plasmoid balls seem to both lack and psossess different traits that are encountered in the ball lightning literature.

So, while a mention of suicidal microwavists might have been interesting as an aside, I see no justification for insisting that their omission is a lapse of judgement.

13

Ball lightning is reported to be seen over cities, where thousands of people could potentially see it (and get a chance of photographing it) at the same time. It’s reported to last sometimes for a minute or more. The inside of a tornado is somewhat different.

Ball lightning has never been captured on film by storm chasers, yet it is often reported to occur near to storms.

As far as I know, it’s never been captured by surveillance cameras, that run 24/7.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so by that reasoning, we all believe in Bigfoot, lake monsters, dowsing and ghosts? Yeah, right.

14

Hi Jinx (hmmm)

Can’t rule out a P-3 Orion with landing lights on, coming virtually straight towards me from an upward pitch angle (from me) of maybe 10 degrees. Think that would put him at pretty low altitude, considering distance light might be seen under hurricane rain conditions. Hard to think more than a couple miles visibility.

Then there was the angular separation of the lights (guessing wider than a car at 100 ft), the angular size of the lights, and as I recall, the lights didn’t drift at the same speed.

Would also guess that the 60-70? knot winds were more than minimums for takeoffs and landings. There was no airport capable of handling a P-3 in that direction, but Tamiami Airport was about 6 miles southwest behind me, and I suppose it could have been heading there.

If the P-3 turned its lamps off (aborted landing?), that would explain the change in color over time, but not necessarily the disintegration effects. There were no trees. This was a new housing development perched on the coral rock that passes for dirt in Miami. The lot across the canal from me was vacant. I had an unobstructed view. Wished I had my wits more about me at the time, but the event caught me by surprise.

Bit

15

Cep, it’s not evidence of absense, but it’s also not evidence of reality. Get a grip.

We seem to be dealing with two alleged phenomena that perversely go by the same name. I don’t know what this sky phenomena is you’re referring to. Balls of fire in the sky that can be seen for miles sound like meteoric boloids – some of which happen to occur in thunderstorms.

I’m referring to a local phenomenon involving short-lived objects fairly small in size that move slowly, and that although they glow, they aren’t especially bright, and don’t seem to set anything on fire or injure anyone, at least from the few accounts I’ve heard.

Bit

16

Evidence?

Without evidence, I don’t believe in these ‘small balls’ either. And anecdotes are not sufficient evidence. Photos or video would be nice.

By the way, this ‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’ thing is a common logical fallacy. What people mean, is that absence of evidence is not proof of non-existence.

Absence of evidence is actually good evidence towards the case for non-existence, though of course, it is not proof.

17

As someone in the Randi forums you linked to said: “I know what I saw”.

If some random person on a messageboard asserted to me that they’d seen something odd, I’d find it difficult to believe too.

But put yourself in my position: I definitely saw a small ball of bright light for a few seconds during a thunderstorm. I am not a liar, nor was it a ‘floater’, nor was it, to my knowledge, an hallucination. But there’s no way of convincing you that my anecdote is true. It’s quite frustrating.

By the way, there are loads of photos on Google purporting to be ball lightning. Why do you dismiss them all?

18

If on one hand you say you don’t know what dragons really are, but you know that they are large, scaly, reptilian, breathe fire, fly, horde gold and kidnap maidens, that’s one thing.

If somebody has a large scaly firebreathing maiden kidnapping gold hording beast in their back yard than by what logic do you say it’s not a dragon?

These guys are producing ball lightning. You can do it to. How can we not discuss it if we are to have the Straight Dope on the issue?

What trait of ball lightning do plasmoid balls not have? You have to realize that just because somebody says they saw one underwater, it doesn’t mean that’s what it was. It could have been a jellyfish fer Chrissakes.

I dunno. I’m getting worried about the old curmudgeon. He writes a column on ball lightning and says he doesn’t know if it’s real or not, meanwhile you can hop all over the net and see how to make them at home.

Seems more than a minor lapse.

19

The ladies have never complained to me …

20

And just for fun, here’s a cite for this dude named Chukanov, who’s doing the microwave oven plasmoid trick, and claiming it’s one giant atom that releases quantum energy, named “Chukanov energy” 'natch.

He’s gonna power cities with it, and he claims it has many health benefits.