RE: Ball Lightning

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: "Cory" <coryrc@xxxxxxxxx>

Can you have your friend shoot some video of this phenomenon, If I recall
didn't Tesla make note of ball lighting is his Colorado springs notes?


-----Original Message-----
From: Tesla list [mailto:tesla@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Monday, January 15, 2007 11:29 PM
To: tesla@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Ball Lightning

Original poster: "resonance" <resonance@xxxxxxxxxxxx>



This may be one explanation of ball lightning, however, I have
witnessed it firsthand, and suspect it was an electrostatic
effect.  It formed under the guy wires of a large radio tower in the
Baraboo, Wisconsin, bluffs.  It would form and sometimes release from
this v-shaped area.  It would persist for 10-30 seconds before softly
exploding.  Sometimes it would also travel down the power wires
delivering power to the transmitter site located at the base of the
tower.  These would persist for a longer period of time, sometimes as
long as 45-60 seconds and travel 200-300 feet before popping. I was a
friend of the station engineer (fellow ham opr) and he invited me up
one summers evening to witness it as it occured for nearly 1 hour.

The radio engineer who lived with his family in a house adjacent to
the transmitter had an incident in which a large ball came through a
wall and terrified his wife before exploding.

After this occured leaves were noted piling up in a symetrical circle
around the base of the tower suggesting an electrostatic effect of
sorts.  It should also be noted the tower is anchored in a quartzite
bluff nearly 600 feet high.  The tower is an additional 600 feet above
ground.

Dr. Resonance


>Now I have something to try.
>
>http://science.slashdot.org/science/07/01/14/0317251.shtml
>
> >From Slashdot
>
>"EWAdams writes to point us to a New Scientist report that the mysterious
>phenomenon of ball lighting has now been created in a Brazilian research
>lab. The phenomenon has long been reported anecdotally but never explained
>or understood. Scientists have devised numerous possible explanations,
>including mini black holes left over from the Big Bang, but have had little
>success in producing working examples. From the article:
>"A more down-to-earth theory... is that ball lightning forms when lightning
>strikes soil, turning any silica in the soil into pure silicon vapor. As
the
>vapor cools, the silicon condenses into a floating aerosol bound into a
ball
>by charges that gather on its surface, and it glows with the heat of
silicon
>recombining with oxygen. To test this idea, a [Brazilian] team... took
>wafers of silicon just 350 micrometers thick, placed them between two
>electrodes and zapped them with currents of up to 140 amps. Then... they
>moved the electrodes slightly apart, creating an electrical arc that
>vaporised the silicon. The arc spat out glowing fragments of silicon but
>also, sometimes, luminous orbs the size of ping-pong balls that persisted
>for up to 8 seconds.""
>
>