Talk:Ball lightning

Hi

Uhm, I saw one of these Ball lightning things in my home city of Targu-Mures, in Romania, the whole city saw it, damage was done to steret lighting and stuff like that, it's a city of about 130.000 or something like that, check it out on Wikipedia.

Everybody knows about it, everybody who was in the city when it happened.

I have a good neighbour who's stuff was destroyed by it, completely.

And yeah, I also felt the sulphur like smell, here's what I think it was: it was the demons I still have inside, even right now, and, they were about to leave, if only I would have let them, but, well, you see, I was such a hypocrite that I didn't, because, well, I didn't know what the thing was, and, I felt like I was going to die if they would have left, but, you see, that was a lie. I regretted not letting them go afterwards, and, I thought to myself that I am a complete hypocrite.

I'm just a guest here at this IP address, the owners of this property are not the ones writing this.

And, you know, it was like I even knew all about it, including the fact that some angels told me that it was going to happen right before it happened, and, well, to not masturabte, which, well, I did, out of sin, however, I now realize that that drive was, well, due to the fallen angels I had in me at that time.

I'm not trying to convince anyone about anything, just add this on it as well.

You know what the problem is with these kind of things? They happen to a lot of people, but, because no one ever says anything, it doesn't get recorded anywhere, such as on Wikipedia. If something happens to two people, and they both know it happened, but they never tell anyone else, or, they don't record it somewhere, well, that thing that happened will be forgotten by everyone else around them.

This is why I like Wikipedia so much, it's the world's best research tool so far, because, well, everybody gets to write here and improve what we know, for, well, as far as I can tell, the purpose of doing good. Who would want evil, right? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.115.25.117 (talk) 23:56, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

This could perhaps be added to the historical review.

"It is said that dragons are seen flying in the air which breathe forth shining fire, but this is impossible to my way of thinking, unless there are those vapors which are called "dragons" and about which determination has been made in the book on weather. These have been experienced as glowing, moving, and smoking in the air, and on occasion to fall in a ball into the water, where they shriek like glowing iron. Sometimes when the vapor rises on a wind, they rise again from the water and burst forth and burn plants and everything they touch. Because, then, of this ascent and descent, and the smoke that spreads like a mist at both ends in the shape of wings, the unskilled think this is a flying animal breathing fire." Albertus Magnus, De Animalibus, 13th century. This sounds like a description of ball lightning. The work accepts dragon as a name for a very large nonvenomous reptile occurring in India but is at some pains to discredit the more fabulous accounts.

Martha A. Sherwood http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albertus_Magnus link for the author — Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.155.170.142 (talk) 19:05, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

Observation

Ball lightning has been observed and reported in a scientific journal. As of today (16th January 2014) a paper has been accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters. On going to press, part of this article may need to be rewritten! A New Scientist article provides a summary. Other media publications are likely to follow. The research seems to support the experimental work of Jerby in Tel Aviv and the theoretical model proposed by Abrahamson in Canterbury. A link to his research page here due to laziness on not finding secondary sources.

Tomásdearg92 (talk) 23:27, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

The elements may be characteristic of the soil (silicon, calcium, and iron) -- but those elements are among those that one would expect in supernova explosions. Supergiant stars in their death throes produce great quantities of these elements and release them in supernova explosions, and even if they are cooled by traveling hundreds or thousands of years (and light-years) in space, they are still moving fast into the oxygen-rich atmosphere of the Earth. Oxidizable material (uncombined silicon, iron, and especially calcium) striking an oxygen-rich atmosphere at great speeds will of course burn due to frictional drag heating them to high temperatures.

The only oxidizing element that would form in the silicon-producing, calcium-producing, and iron-producing shells of late-stage supergiant stars is sulfur (oxygen would be produced elsewhere -- "higher" in the dying star), but sulfides would themselves burn in those circumstances. Sulfur is about as oxidizable as it is oxidizing. That ball lighting seems to come from nowhere practically begs for an explanation. Uncombined iron is to be found in meteorites, but uncombined silicon and especially calcium are understood to be artificial on Earth.

It's simply conjecture on my part. Experiments will confirm or debunk what I suggest.Pbrower2a (talk) 13:54, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

François Arago

The article states:

Several theories have been advanced since it was brought into the scientific realm by the English physician and electrical researcher William Snow Harris in 1843, and French Academy scientist François Arago in 1855

François Arago died in 1853. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.25.208.161 (talk) 23:25, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

His Meteorological Essays weren't published until 1855. Richerman (talk) 00:06, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Item for "Other accounts" section

Richard Henry Dana, Jr. wrote what appears to be an account of ball lightning in his book Two Years Before the Mast. It's some time since I read it, and I don't have the book to hand, but he describes an event at sea when a ball of fire appeared and travelled up or down a mast, moved to another mast and travelled up or down that one. It did not burn the ship and eventually disappeared - possibly with a popping sound - can't remember now. If I find the book I'll add a quote to the article - unless someone else would like to check it out first. There is a slight chance that the passage that I am remembering was not in Two Years Before the Mast, but in Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle - but it's definitely in one or the other. In that book, Darwin says he found glass rods buried vertically in a South American beach, and concluded that lightning rods shooting through the sand had melted the silica and created those rods - so he had an interest in that kind of phenomenon. Sorry I read both books in the 1970s, hence the vagueness. --Storye book (talk) 10:02, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

The lightning on the mast sounds like St. Elmo's fire and in fact that article refers to Two Years Before the Mast. The glass rods on the beach were probably fulgurites. 50.0.121.102 (talk) 18:55, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

book chapter

This is pretty good: V. L. Bychkov (2012), "Unsolved Mystery of Ball Lightning"[1]

From: V. Shevelko and H. Tawara (eds.), Atomic Processes in Basic and Applied Physics, Springer Series on Atomic, Optical, and Plasma Physics 68, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-25569-4 1, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012.

I may try to use some stuff from it in the article, but of course anyone wanting to get to it first is welcome to do so.

50.0.121.102 (talk) 23:33, 4 February 2014 (UTC)