Ball Lightening Revisited

     A few years ago I did a post on this rare phenomenon. According to a recent article on EarthSky, "until recent years, most scientists remained skeptical about ball lightning; it seemed more myth than reality." The basic features of ball lightning are the prolonged the duration, the floating and the sudden disappearance. 

     The skeptics are muttonheads; they believe that just because they have not seem something or can't duplicated it in a lab then it must not exist. 

     Since the time of the early Greeks, there have been reports of small balls of bright plasma-like light moving over the ground and then vanishing. But, it's a fable, they say. 

     Ball lightning has been reported for centuries. It is typically about the size of a grapefruit, moving slowly over the ground. They have been seen during electrical storms, hence the early theories that they were simply a different form of lightning. They usually disappear after 10 seconds, quietly, but sometimes a bang sound can be heard. They have even been observed to pass through closed windows. 

     My father, who was a section foreman on the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, told me of having seen ball lightening bouncing down the tracks between the rails until it disappeared with a bang and a puff of smoke. 

     I also witnessed ball lightening once while in elementary school. During a thunderstorm a ball of lightening about the size of a basketball passed through the classroom window and disappeared with a loud bang and a puff of smoke. Needless to say, it was a frightening experience. I do not remember smelling anything, but some witnesses have reported a sulfurous smell. 

     Scientists are apparently skeptical because no pictures of ball lightening actually exist, or so they say. They claim that the online images are over-exposed images of ordinary lightening. 

     Research on this mysterious lightening was published in a peer-reviewed paper in the July 2019 issue of the journal Optik by Vladimir Torchigin from the Russian Academy of Sciences. 

     According to the research, ball lightning might not actually be true lightning. Originally Torchigin thought ball lightening might be light trapped inside a sphere of thin air...photons (basic units of light) ricocheting inside an air-bubble. His scientific explanation is beyond the scope of this post, but his new research suggests that the mysterious ball lightning, as observed by eyewitnesses, consists only of light and highly compressed air. The thin layer of air resembles the film of a soap bubble which could focus light like a lens. That theory is just that...a theory.

     In another theory, University of Canterbury engineer John Abrahamson suggested that ball lightning could be the result of vaporized ground material being pushed up by a shockwave of air. The particles are bound together by electrical charges and they glow hot due a chemical reaction between the silicon and oxygen in the air. 

     Ball lightning, or something similar, has been created in lab experiments. In a study from 2007, researchers at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil used electricity to vaporize tiny wafers of silicon which created blue or orange-white spheres the size of ping-pong balls that lasted as long as eight seconds. 

     In the end, scientists still don't know what ball lightening, but their research suggests it might be real. Trust me! It does exist because I saw it and my dad saw it. 

Read more... Scientific American article