Ball lightning in a Lab - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: jonovid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 13, 2025, 07:39:36 am
content: Submarine Battery Bank shorted. Initially called ball lightning, now Leidenfrost Effect. August 1994can ball lightning be made in a lab under controlled conditions.what if the DC spark gap is partly submerged in water or has an external magnetic field added?

author: radiolistener
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 13, 2025, 09:54:46 am
content: What is shown on the video is not true ball lightning but a high-current arcingAs I know genuine ball lightning remains poorly understood and still cannot be reliably produced under controlled lab conditions.Once, after a thunderstorm, my close relatives observed a blue ball lightning, roughly 50 mm in diameter, enter the house through a windowpane without causing any damage or melting. It moved slowly across the room and eventually disappeared under the floor without any explosion. If I recall their account correctly, they also heard a hissing sound reminiscent of a short circuit. It is quite puzzling that this plasma formation passed through the glass without leaving any trace of damage. Another unusual aspect is its relatively small size, whereas typical descriptions of this phenomenon often mention much larger spheres of 30–40 cm or more. Based on their description, it is difficult to explain this phenomenon with our current understanding of physics, as it is unclear how a plasma structure could remain stable and airborne without an external influence.I have attempted several times to find science research on this phenomenon, but unfortunately, there is very limited information available, at least in the public domain.

author: Psi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 13, 2025, 10:15:59 am
content: Agree.It's not ball lightning unless it's levitating well off the ground in a way that seems to defy gravity.

author: jonpaul
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 13, 2025, 10:39:08 am
content: LOD.ORGGreg LEYH

author: HighVoltage
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 13, 2025, 10:43:09 am
content: I also agree, this is not ball lightening!

author: vtp
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: September 13, 2025, 04:17:50 pm
content: Quote from: radiolistener on September 13, 2025, 09:54:46 amThank you for your description of this phenomena.Couple of weeks ago we had a huge thunderstorm move over us during early morning hours. There was a lightning strike very close and having not slept well during the night because of all the light and sound show I got up from bed. Just getting to sit on the edge of the bed an ellipsoid of about 40 by 15 cm as seen from my viewpoint appeared near hallway ceiling about three meters from me. It was like a dense collection of miniature "lightnings", white in colour with slight blue tinge. It just appeared there, hissed for 5 seconds or so and then disappeared.I guess that was what is typically called ball lightning, though it certainly did not look like a ball and did not move around either. There are enough descriptions of this phenomena appearing that I was inclined to believe it is real but never thought I would see one myself.I'd rather not repeat the experience though.

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 13, 2025, 05:27:05 pm
content: Even the existence of ball lightning is disputed by some scientists. Wikipedia lists 17 theories which attempt to explain the phenomenon, none of which have gained much traction, especially as the evidence for the existence of ball lightning is overwhelmingly subjective. None of the evidence has led to reproducible tests in a laboratory. Also, experiments with domestic microwave ovens - which can sometimes produce a short-lived glowing ball - do not support (or deny) the existence of "real" or "natural" ball lightning, because the microwave phenomenon is well understood and does not match the observed behaviour of ball lightning.The ability of ball lightning to pass through solid materials (reports include passing through a glass window, and through the metal fuselage of an aircraft) cannot be adequately explained by current physics, which - in the opinion of the most sceptical scientists - implies there is no such material phenomenon. (One of the 17 theories mentioned above is "hallucination.)EDIT: having watched the video there is nothing like ball lightning going on. They appear to be white hot glowing metallic particles.

author: Cyclotron
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 13, 2025, 06:01:01 pm
content: Quote from: SteveThackery on September 13, 2025, 05:27:05 pmI agree that the existence and especially the nature of whatever is causing the reports has long been speculated on and doubted. When I read this thread it triggered memory that I thought proof of its existence had been filmed and that is somewhat confirmed here:https://medium.com/looking-up/ball-lightning-b594b6ffea37The sprites and other phenomenon that happen in the upper atmosphere known as transient Luminous Events (TLEs) might be similar. I certainly view reports of the phenomenon passing unhindered through various substrates with significant incredulity.

author: floobydust
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 13, 2025, 07:21:54 pm
content: It was apparently common to see ball plasma when switching submarine DC motor power.But that experiment with shorting the submarine battery bank, with old batteries, also did not include the motor's inductance. It looked more like molten metal spraying everywhere.Past July, lightning strike made this floating sphere sure look interesting... it lasted a long time.https://www.ctvnews.ca/climate-and-environment/article/never-seen-this-before-mysterious-orb-of-light-filmed-in-alberta/Youtube clips of it are terrible, full of annoying news presenters.

author: radiolistener
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 13, 2025, 10:30:17 pm
content: Quote from: SteveThackery on September 13, 2025, 05:27:05 pmThe difficulty I see with the “hallucination” hypothesis in the case I described above is that the phenomenon was observed simultaneously by two people, who described seeing and hearing exactly the same thing. It would be rather unusual to explain how two individuals could experience an identical visual and auditory hallucination at the same time. The particular incident I referred to took place in the 1960s.From my point of view, this phenomenon might be explained as a kind of soliton. A soliton is a localized, self-reinforcing wave structure that can maintain its shape and stability while propagating. As I can see, if ball lightning were some form of electromagnetic soliton, or a more complex topological field configuration, this could account for several puzzling features of the phenomenon, such as its ability to move without rapid dissipation and to pass through solid materials without leaving damage, as the interaction might be governed more by fields than by direct thermal contact.In this context, the hissing sound could be attributed to air ionization caused by the intense electric field strength in the vicinity of the soliton. Its passage through glass without causing damage might be explained by the fact that, for such a field-based structure, glass could effectively appear transparent.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 13, 2025, 11:55:09 pm
content: Photonic Induction's videos are pretty good if you want to see some arcs. I've never seen ball lighting but we had friends who where a married couple. They were telling us about seeing what they described as a ball of light that traveled through their home's basement lasting several seconds. I don't recall them mentioning any sound but this has been many years ago. I understand it caused no damage and never repeated.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 14, 2025, 12:09:56 am
content: Quote from: SteveThackery on September 13, 2025, 05:27:05 pmThere's enough eyewitness accounting to believe that something similar to ball lightning does exist as a physical phenomena. It's probably shorter-lived and smaller than stated, and yes, I doubt it can phase through solid matter. But the idea of lightning being able to form some kind of short-lived charged "particle" that seems to exist for multiple seconds longer than would be expected does seem to be substantiated by some of the available evidence.I think it's worth noting how little we know about lightning. Red sprites for instance are a relatively rare phenomena and have been hard to document. Since it seems ball lightning only appears when lightning strikes certain soils, and only at the site of a strike, it will be very hard to get direct video evidence. Any footage will be captured by coincidence only.

author: Cyclotron
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 14, 2025, 02:44:43 am
content: I saw that video talked about on this youtube channel:I recall him saying it was likely power lines arching.

author: Psi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 14, 2025, 03:49:11 am
content: My guess is ball lightning is some form of almost self-sustaining fusion/coldfusion reaction very rarely triggered by lightning when you get exactly the right conditions. The hovering aspect reported is kinda odd though, no idea if that is electrostatic, magnetic, gravitational, or some sort of charged particle thrust. I am happy that there's strange stuff yet to be discovered.

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 14, 2025, 05:31:19 am
content: Or it's tired people constructing memories using the fable after getting blinded by lightning ... the video evidence is really shitty, now in the AI age better looking but still shitty.It's fun to theorise though. A self sustaining plasma with circulating charged species is of course popular, but those won't pass through glass without breaking it. The most likely explanation for something which can truly go through glass, is light somehow being able to form a self sustaining bubble of super-heated air with total internal reflection, which even for ball lightning theories is getting a bit silly. Every other theory for something which can go through glass gets even sillier.

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 14, 2025, 08:16:44 am
content: Quote from: radiolistener on September 13, 2025, 10:30:17 pmQuote from: Psi on September 14, 2025, 03:49:11 amTheories 18 and 19.....

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 14, 2025, 08:18:55 am
content: Quote from: floobydust on September 13, 2025, 07:21:54 pmThat flickering intensity looks exactly like power line arcing to me.

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 14, 2025, 08:21:56 am
content: I find it amusing that people get jealous of those who have seen ball plasma and start getting into psychiatry crapI thought it had to do with some long standing beef with fusion power containment development, as it is self confined plasma, and its unclear what the upper energy level limit is. I have only seen a form that looked like a neon indicator, to me that proves its stable at low energy levels.The things that came to my mind, is that according to plasma physics as we know it, it either needs a shell, a monopole (yikes, this will get some physicists waving torches), cold fusion (even worse)The most common easy solution is that its a torus, but of course I had to see a rather perfect 'marble'. I am glad I saw it because its easy to get trapped in some layer of abstraction about electricity that makes it banal (simple circuits). If you get rid of a number of observations, you end up with a very banal model of electricity which makes it easy to 'totally solve'.

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 14, 2025, 08:32:00 am
content: Quote from: coppercone2 on September 14, 2025, 08:21:56 amThe hallucination theory isn't "psychiatry crap"; it has about as much scientific credibility as the other theories.Cooray, Gerald; Cooray, Vernon (February 2021). "Could Some Ball Lightning Observations be Optical Hallucinations Caused by Epileptic Seizures?". The Open Atmospheric Science Journal. 2: 101–105. doi:10.2174/1874282300802010101.Peer, J.; Kendl, A. (2010). "Transcranial stimulability of phosphenes by long lightning electromagnetic pulses". Physics Letters A. 374 (29): 2932–2935. arXiv:1005.1153. Bibcode:2010PhLA..374.2932P. doi:10.1016/j.physleta.2010.05.023. S2CID 119276495.Ball lightning is all in the mind, say Austrian physicists, The Register, 19 May 2010.Emerging Technology (11 May 2010). "Magnetically Induced Hallucinations Explain Ball Lightning, Say Physicists". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 6 July 2020.I strongly recommend you check out the Wikipedia article - it's rather good.

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 14, 2025, 08:34:26 am
content: I had a old professor that started ranting about psychiatry when it came to monopole data (when he got involved in comptrolling research funds)I avoid such explanations. I felt like I was getting gaslighted and interrogated about what I saw. Of course it has consequences too, depending on what it does when a plasma hits another circuit node.I saw it as nothing more then "we need a defense to prevent these hard to achieve experiments from getting funded" because the theory of estimating a experiments difficulty is nothing but a question.Right around the time they started selling massive amounts of expenisve equipment to chinese labs too, so when the budget is bad make sure you have a method of making sure that only easy fruit are reached for

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 14, 2025, 09:17:10 am
content: Quote from: coppercone2 on September 14, 2025, 08:21:56 amIf you want to explain high powered ones, there's always the explanations with metal cores. Burning metal has plenty of energy. Although again, not going through glass.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 14, 2025, 09:29:28 am
content: Retina burn from a lightening flash. You know yourself if you "follow" the blob it moves slowly around the place. Your eyes are confused because the image they are tracking is not really there, but as your eyes are not perfectly stationary your brain thinks its moving and "follows" it. Rather it is following nothing, rather leading the "ball" through the air.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 14, 2025, 09:33:57 am
content: Quote from: SteveThackery on September 13, 2025, 05:27:05 pmI watched it years ago. I agree. It's chunks of vapourising / molten / burning metal behaving exactly like water would on a hot pan. "Skitting around on their own degasing."

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 14, 2025, 09:48:25 am
content: Quote from: SteveThackery on September 14, 2025, 08:18:55 amIf you pause the video when it flickers and frame step you will see it is 3 LED lights on the front of a tractor behind some odd fog mirage effect.You also see the lights come back up to full power over 2 or 3 frames. The darker shape of what could be a tractor is bent and distorted like you are looking through water at it.

author: 5U4GB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 14, 2025, 09:53:10 am
content: Quote from: radiolistener on September 13, 2025, 09:54:46 amDrawing an analogy to "spontaneous human combustion" aka. the wick effect, it'll remain quite a mystery until at some point somebody will say "you know, it looks like this is what's going on here", whereupon most people will say "oh, of course, why didn't we think of that before, it's so obvious". A small percentage will still think its aliens or subatomic particles unknown to science or whatever, but what can you do.

author: Cyclotron
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 14, 2025, 10:10:15 am
content: Quote from: 5U4GB on September 14, 2025, 09:53:10 amRequired:

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 14, 2025, 10:19:21 am
content: The funniest lightening phenomena I have witnessed was the year someone bought me beer for xmas and it came with a bottle opener that played jingle bells.First beer I opened with it, decided, "Yep, that got old fast" and chucked it over my shoulder down the back of the corner cabinet never to be seen again.Until 2 years later lightening struck the church spire 100 yards away and all I see and hear was FLASH - Deedeedee Deedeedee, deededededede. THUNDER.

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 14, 2025, 01:23:00 pm
content: Excellent!

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 14, 2025, 01:29:38 pm
content: Quote from: 5U4GB on September 14, 2025, 09:53:10 amActually even that is far from sorted. The wick effect - as demonstrated on pigs - definitely produces similar results to the charred bodies we've seen in the old photos of SHC. However, there remains some mystery around the source of the fire, at least in some cases. And there's a couple of cases where the fire appeared apparently without a source, on the body of an active, conscious person. I recall a case where flames appeared from someone's leg and resisted attempts to extinguish it.Unfortunately the phenomenon is exceptionally rare, and some of the accounts and reports may well be unreliable.

author: Psi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 16, 2025, 11:06:39 am
content: I think all these sort of things are just some yet to be discovered science. Where, by pure chance, circumstances or materials happen to align and you get some reaction that makes no sense based on modern science.I do sometimes wonder if the so called 'island of stability' exists, and if so, what strange properties those atoms might have.And, if they are indeed stable, do we rarely get some raining down from space causing odd things to happen from time to time due to there interactions.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 16, 2025, 11:36:10 am
content: Quote from: Psi on September 16, 2025, 11:06:39 amThe trouble with the island of stability postulation is where we see "stability" we see "abundance". Iron and cobolt for example are the most stable of the normal elements. Due to the energy peak at iron 60. Heavier elements require energy to fuse not release it. So everything decays initially in that direction. At the same time normal star processes can't make heavier. For that we rely on super/hyper nova or exotic physics.So either this island of stability exists at energy levels higher than produced under 99.9999999% of cosmic circumstances or it doesn't exist.If it exists at energy levels higher than in the largest hypernova.... then we aren't going to create that energy level either.Think about the fusion energy required to fuse cesium and xenon or some Uranium decay pair. Its going to be equal and maybe greater than the fission energy released.Neutron accretion theory could possibly mean these elements exist, but are just extremely rare.We talked about "models" in other threads. I personally think the whole particle physics and cosmology knock ons are just a rather simple, but inaccurate set of models which has been patched and redone and fiddled too many times. It's clearly broken. However, a lot of people still use it as there isn't anything else. It will take a revolution and we may be waiting a while for it.I find it extremely odd that nature is so sloppy in one hand and so frugile in the other. Being sloppy enough to mean that a Proton+Electron != Nuetron. But frugile and dilligent enough to "balance the discrepancy" with a neutrino with EXACTLY the difference in kinetic energy.Why?

author: EPAIII
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 18, 2025, 10:11:45 am
content: OK, I can't resist.THEORY 20Two black holes. One here and the other far, far away.Big bunch of electrons falling in/out of oneBig bunch of positrons falling in/out of the other.They are linked to each other, just as depicted in the movie.Positions are not completely stable so they move around and can "pass" through solid objects.Just a wild idea that popped up in my head as I read this thread.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 18, 2025, 10:17:37 am
content: Electron-Positron annihilation events happens all the time around you. If you get a gamma spectra-graph they show as a small bump at the appropriate eV energy level, 1400keV .... plucked out of my head, probably wrong figure.They naturally occur because some naturally occuring radio-iostopes emit positrons during decay and they immedaitely collide with an electron and ZAP.So they - gamma emissions - would be very easy to detect for quite a distance.There is the gravity thing too.

author: Obsidianxenon
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: September 23, 2025, 02:01:09 am
content: Thought I'd add my ball lightning experience(s) to stir up the theories:The first time I was half asleep, so this very well could allude to the hallucination theory. It was a large (maybe 400mm diameter) ball of white light, but it was sort of a force-field type object with tendrils (like a plasma globe) running from the surface to the blindingly bright centre (this was about 300mm from my face). It proceeded to phase into the floor, no sound heard.The second time I was actually awake and it was before a large storm. A small white ball appeared about 20m away in the air, zipped across the top of my vision before I looked up, then I got a clear view for about a second, before it faded away.Maybe neither of these were ball lightning, but it fits the description fairly well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

author: Electrodynamic
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: September 23, 2025, 04:57:49 pm
content: Interesting topic.I replicated some small ball lightning based on much of the anecdotal evidence on the internet over the years. Most ball lightning seems to occur when lightning hits hard rock formations like granite not farmland, forest or cities. So my working theory was the insane amount of current and voltage involved may have vaporized rock containing small amounts of conducting and dielectric material. Similar to some effects I have seen arc welding at high amperage where the arc can eject molten or vaporized material long distances.I used my 700 kV Van de Graaff to charge a 5 gallon bucket HV capacitor and dump the discharge through a small container of powdered metal. I also tried mixtures of powdered mica and metal with some success. The effect seems to rely on part of the metal being completely vaporized and not simply a particulate.The discharge must also be very abrupt and I used a HV interrupter and quenched spark gap which is common for most Tesla coil guys like myself. I also found my Tesla coil seems to have very little effect compared to the DC Van de Graaff more in line with a lightning strike.

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 23, 2025, 09:35:49 pm
content: Quote from: Electrodynamic on September 23, 2025, 04:57:49 pmWhat do you mean by "success"? How do you know you produced ball lightning, when there is no agreed definition for what ball lightning actually is? Or even that it's a real thing.There are various ways of producing a roughly spherical ball of glowing gas (you can do it with a microwave), but none of those have recreated the most mysterious characteristic of "real" ball lightning: it's oft-reported ability to pass through glass, solid walls, and even the metallic walls of aircraft.I deliberately put "real" in quotation marks because we just don't know if there is any such thing as "real" ball lightning, or what it actually is.

author: Psi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2025, 05:23:20 am
content: I think if regular high voltage and amperage used in industry could trigger it we would have seen it and stubbled across a way to reproduce it for study by now.So I suspect it requires a levels of energy you only get in a lightning strike, and maybe only when it gets focused into a small enough point.Maybe one day industry will be working with that sort of energy and we will see it when the right sort of material gets hit in the right way.I think it breaks down some barrier to trigger the effect and we just can't do that yet.I wouldn't be at all be surprised if very high temp superconducting has something to do with it.

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2025, 11:19:24 am
content: The most resectable theory is probably that fulgurite channels spew a big plume of reduced silicon (sand+carbon+energy) with it condensing in light enough filaments it can just move with the wind.Might be easier to explode a container of silicon vapor than replicating the high energy discharge needed to create that amount of vapour from soil.

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2025, 01:21:40 pm
content: How many theories are we up to now - 20? 21?

author: Electrodynamic
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2025, 03:49:33 pm
content: StevethackeryQuoteThe normal definition is a plasma sphere or ball produced by lightning. It's common knowledge that a HV high energy discharge can vaporize and ionize materials then produce small plasma spheres. The only real issue in question is the ionization and containment of larger spheres.The obvious solution is to quiz a credible AI about ball lightning. The majority of people have a limited knowledge base and biases which effect their judgement.QuoteI agree plasma spheres are common knowledge to anyone who works with HV. So it should be no mystery that the larger the discharge of energy like lightning the larger the plasma sphere would be. It's basically a given that what many describe is possible.Here is a good example,Making plasma with grapes is not remarkable. The fact 99% of people had literally no idea how to explain the phenomena is. If they cannot even understand how plasma is formed between two grapes then it's easy to see how ball lightning might elude them.In my opinion the often reported ability to pass through glass, solid walls, and even the metallic walls of aircraft is questionable. Most people get scared and lose it over anything out of the ordinary. So it's very likely their observations are skewed and not very credible.QuoteOf course they are real, as I said the plasma sphere phenomena is well know to most people working with HV. The basic science has already been established. The only question is the ionization and containment of larger plasma spheres like those produced by lightning.

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2025, 04:18:55 pm
content: One of the fundamental problems with ball lightning is the power source and if you assume it's electrical in nature, how that power source converts to electricity, electrical currents in air take a lot of power to sustain.That's why the ball of silicon fluff is so attractive ... it's just slowly burning, nothing more. The leaps of thought necessary are relatively small. Just no one has been able to show a good experimental example.

author: microwhat
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2025, 04:30:30 pm
content: Quote from: Electrodynamic on September 24, 2025, 03:49:33 pmNobody knows/can agree on what ball lightning is, and you expect a bullshit generator bot to know?

author: Electrodynamic
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2025, 05:54:57 pm
content: MarcoQuoteThe power source and how it's transformation is easy, google Lenard, J.J. Thompson, the Lenard effect and Atmospheric Electrodynamics.QuoteThe best experiment always relates directly to the properties of the phenomena in question. Which means a very high voltage high current source, a large VAD or volt arc discharge and a material for the VAD to discharge into. I used a 700kV DC source, a large HV capacitor and a HV interrupter/quenched spark gap. This is not for amateurs and is absolutely lethal. Real science more so HV research is always risky.If your interested in smaller plasma discharges here is a good place to start,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJE8SXIiJcI,a cheap water spark plug circuit.Ignore the hearsay associated with this circuit. It basically combines a HV 30kV ignition coil source with a high current 300v source from a capacitor. In fact, the plasma discharge can be so abrupt it can eject small ionized pieces of material resembling a plasma ball. The video doesn't depict the sound or intensity accurately and it can sound like a small rifle going off in the room if done right.I used this circuit for plasma experiments and the ignition source for a lean burn 6 stroke engine I was working on. Really cool circuit.

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2025, 06:30:02 pm
content: Quote from: Electrodynamic on September 24, 2025, 05:54:57 pmA significant enough amount of stored charge inside the ball would just make it fly apart. Or if it's a neutral plasma, the charges would just almost immediately recombine ... you'll need some currents and fields slowing down the recombination somehow and then it ain't easy any more. Not as easy as slow burning silicon.Charge is a terrible power source in any theory which is supposed to explain it exists for any significant duration.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2025, 11:00:52 pm
content: Quote from: microwhat on September 24, 2025, 04:30:30 pmI'm seeing this more and more often, the belief that AI chatbots know more somehow... Please, people, chatbots only know what they have been trained on. They do not synthesise knowledge and they are not intelligent. They are very capable of giving plausible answers where one does not exist. I find them useful tools, but use them like a supercharged google, not like an all-knowing oracle.

author: Cyclotron
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 25, 2025, 03:43:07 am
content: Quote from: tom66 on September 24, 2025, 11:00:52 pmWhat's more is that AI can provide convincing language supporting or claiming facts that are not true or proven. Pure math is difficult for AI and true/false isn't natural for it. Learning patterns and behaviors of human's predilections for supporting their own lunacy AI can combine an echo chamber of nonsense in support or against any given topic that is completely wrong.I agree that "net new" isn't the realm of today's LLMs. They can and do find interesting patterns quickly that are just below the surface of the collective knowledge pool though. Using them as tom66 says for tools of exploration, research, and possible target areas is a good thing but you must always suspect their output especially the more detailed it becomes.Interesting AI is not "general purpose" AI that most people interact with. The more interesting ones to me are those trained in very narrow sets or canon.

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 25, 2025, 09:02:36 am
content: Quote from: Electrodynamic on September 24, 2025, 03:49:33 pmWhat??!! You could not be more wrong.There areat least 17 theoriespublished in scientific papers on what ball lightning is. Including one with significant support that declares ball lightning to be a hallucination.Everybody knows about the small, short-lived glowing balls you can make with a microwave or a high voltage rig. Your fundamental mistake isassumingthat ball lightning is a ball of plasma like those HV technicians observe. And then when it comes to the inconvenient parts that don't fit your theory, like passing through glass, you declarethoseparts to be a hallucination!! ("...people get scared and lose it"). Talk about having your cake and eating it!This is the truth: nobody has been able to reproduce the phenomenon reported by observers of ball lightning. Nobody has been able to produce a glowing ball the size of a child's head, lasting up to a minute, but on average about 25 seconds, after the initial energy input. (Scientific American, 18th July, 1997). Nobody has been able to produce a glowing ball that passes through glass, solid walls or metallic walls. Nobody has been able to produce a glowing ball that enters a property through the chimney."Ball lightning is a well-documented phenomenon in the sense that it has been seen and consistently described by people in all walks of life since the time of the ancient Greeks. There is no accepted theory for what causes it. It does not necessarily consist of plasma; for example, ball lightning could be the result of a chemiluminescent process. The literature abounds with speculations on the physics of the ball lightning."- Martin A Uman, University of FloridaThis is the source I'm quoting from:https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/periodically-i-hear-stori/It is an excellent overview of the science, despite being from 1997, because no significant progress on the topic has been made since then. For a more up to date overview, I recommend the various sources cited in this Wikipedia article:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning?wprov=sfla1Even if you don't trust Wikipedia, the cited sources are a great resource for further research.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 25, 2025, 10:46:45 am
content: Have we done retina burn? Which technically would be a hallucination induced by retina burn being miss interrupted.

author: Electrodynamic
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: September 25, 2025, 04:20:48 pm
content: SteveThackeryQuoteThis is a very good article which falls in line with the majority of my reasoning.In my experiments I used a large capacitor charged to 700kV DC and an interrupter/quenched spark gap. It was meant to mimic lightning which is a very abrupt high energy plasma discharge. Here the very small time period may be critical for the generation of VHF transient related effects.QuoteI find this interesting and could be explained by Earths vertical electric field of 100v/m and non-uniform magnetic field. It seems reasonable that the plasma ball could follow an electric field gradient similar to objects suspended in a fluid pressure gradient.I'm starting to regret donating my Van de Graaff to our nearby high school. It might be time for an upgrade.

author: Cyclotron
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 25, 2025, 09:14:05 pm
content: Quote from: paulca on September 25, 2025, 10:46:45 amThat one had me thinking.

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 25, 2025, 09:25:34 pm
content: Quote from: Electrodynamic on September 25, 2025, 04:20:48 pmYou're doing it again: assuming ball lightning is a plasma ball.Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to create a ball of plasma that endures, with no further energy input after its creation, for 25 seconds. It must be about the size of a child's head and approximately spherical, it must radiate light, and must exist in normal air (no vacuum chambers or fancy gases). It must behave as if it were weightless, or very nearly so.Should you get caught or killed (or electrocuted), Dave Jones will disavow all knowledge of your mission, and will delete this thread from his servers.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 25, 2025, 10:12:34 pm
content: Quote from: SteveThackery on September 25, 2025, 09:25:34 pmGood one.And I notice you were lenient and didn't insist that it be able to go through glass or walls.

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 26, 2025, 12:17:02 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on September 25, 2025, 10:12:34 pmActually I was saving that for his next mission. 😄

author: Electrodynamic
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: September 26, 2025, 03:39:30 pm
content: StevethackeryQuoteI accepted it 20 years ago Steve.As I said..."In my experiments I used a large capacitor charged to 700kV DC and an interrupter/quenched spark gap. It was meant to mimic lightning which is a very abrupt high energy plasma discharge. Here the very small time period may be critical for the generation of VHF transient related effects".However, what I did not accept is much of the second hand hearsay surroundings ball lightning. Should we believe little green aliens in ufo's are abducting cattle just because a few people claimed they saw it?. Well no, that seems a little woo woo imo.Question to AI , can small plasma balls be generated during arc welding.Answer, Yes, small plasma balls can be generated during arc welding, particularly in processes like plasma arc welding, where the arc creates a highly ionized gas that can form small, stable plasma structures.Ergo, it has already been established that larger plasma events do in fact produce smaller stable plasma structures. It should not take a rocket scientist to understand if we scaled up the plasma discharge the stable plasma structures should increase in size as well. Of course the real problem would be generating a lightning bolt at 100 million to 1 billion volts and 10,000 to 200,000 amperes which is beyond our capability at present.

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 26, 2025, 04:04:38 pm
content: Quote from: Electrodynamic on September 26, 2025, 03:39:30 pmAs long as the arc is there, same as candles in a microwave ... remove the energy input and the only thing which continues glowing is hot metal.

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 26, 2025, 07:16:15 pm
content: Quote from: Electrodynamic on September 26, 2025, 03:39:30 pmYou are STILL doing it!! You seem fixated on plasma.Just because your AI says small balls of plasma can be produced during welding (by the way, what does "stable" mean, in your argument?), that does NOT mean that scaling the whole thing up produces ball lightning. It probably means bigger plasma balls, although we still don't have much supporting evidence. Well, virtually none. And we simply have no idea how those bigger balls behave.I have sympathy with your position regarding the more extraordinary claims for ball lightning. However, it is highly unscientific to select the data that supports your theory and reject all the inconvenient stuff. That is not science.Why can't you just say what every other scientist who has explored this phenomenon says: we simply don't know what it is. We have never been able to produce it in the lab. It might be plasma, although our current understanding of the physics does not support this because we can't produce plasma that floats around in the air and continues to glow for half a minute - maybe a bit less - with no apparent energy supply. It might be chemiluminescence, vaporised silicon, or any number of other theories. We don't know."We don't know" is good science. Try it.

author: metrologist
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 26, 2025, 08:13:29 pm
content: Quote from: SteveThackery on September 25, 2025, 09:25:34 pmQuote from: SteveThackery on September 26, 2025, 07:16:15 pm

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 26, 2025, 08:45:02 pm
content: Quote from: metrologist on September 26, 2025, 08:13:29 pmOK, OK! Selective quoting makes me seem a bit of an idiot. 😄My point was this: @Electrodynamic insists ball lightning is plasma - just a big version of the teeny balls you see when welding. So my challenge was "OK, then, show us some plasma that behaves like ball lightning".I'm sure it makes sense now. 😁. It's all part of my quest to convince @Electrodynamic that he might be wrong to insist it is plasma, when the settled scientific position is "We don't know what it is".

author: Electrodynamic
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: September 27, 2025, 03:23:10 pm
content: SteveThackeryQuoteIt's okay, I understand your perspective.QuoteI wouldn't say I'm insisting or fixated, rather pointing out the theory which relies on the least assumptions is probably the right one. If an event is produced by a large scale plasma event like lightning the odds are very great the effect is directly related to a plasma event. Of course, we don't know what all the actual effects are but we do know the cause of it which is a large scale plasma event.As well there is some evidence to support the plasma theory.https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/518/2/2287/6807474These plasmoids were measured to be about 9000km in diameter, traveled at near 380km/s and last up to a minute."Our analysis shows that the emission of these plasmoids starts close to the base of the jet(s), where we believe that a strong current interface is formed". This is similar to some observations claiming the ball lightning appeared at the point where the lightning struck the Earth. Ergo, the ejection of extremely ionized material in the presence of strong magnetic fields.This is not quite the same as ball lightning the size of a watermelon floating around our head and only relates to a possible cause which relies on the least assumptions.

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 27, 2025, 06:04:25 pm
content: The environment near the sun doesn't exactly lack large power inputs. That's closer to a microwave plasmoid than ball lightning.

author: Electrodynamic
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: September 28, 2025, 04:36:18 pm
content: MarcoQuoteNor does lightning at 100 million to 1 billion volts and 10,000 to 200,000 amperes. At the upper end were dealing with large numbers. One billion volts times 200,000 amperes equals 200 trillion watts delivered in around 30 microseconds on average.QuoteI would agree and was more interested in high energy discharges which result in near spherical plasma forms. This may also relate to the uncontrolled plasma pinch effect and plasma compression.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinch_(plasma_physics)Of course, as one member implied, I'm just guessing. Looking at countless phenomena which combined could result in a stable spherical plasma form. As well, my interest as always relates to energy. Imagine being able to contain 6 gigajoules of energy from a lightning bolt in the form of a stable plasma sphere. That's one hell of a battery and equal to around 253 shipping containers filled with lithium polymer batteries.

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 28, 2025, 06:33:45 pm
content: The solar environment provides continuous power, much like the microwave.