[HN Gopher] Benedictine monk wrote earliest known reference to b...
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Benedictine monk wrote earliest known reference to ball lightning
in England
Author : Tomte
Score : 44 points
Date : 2022-09-01 16:06 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| PeterStuer wrote:
| I persoally witnessed ball lightning. At the time, myself nor my
| family members that were with me knew it was that special. I
| mean, not that we had witnessed this before or since, but we had
| no idea that this was even disputed or had a name.
|
| This tennis ball sized ball of lightning came in the house during
| a storm through our kitchen back door that stood open. It very
| slowly swerved acoross the floor at a few centimeters height. It
| was so slow you could have caught it, for which admittedly I felt
| the urge. We just stood around an watched it. Then it made it's
| way to the living room, slowly but surely making it's way towards
| the television (which was not turned on). When it got to about 2
| or 3 meters from the set, it made a curved leap, sort of like a
| logarithmic curve, right to the center of the CRT. This took out
| the electricity not just in our house, but apparenrly in several
| houses down our street.
|
| This must have been sometime late 70's or early 80's. If we had
| known how rare this was, I'm sure we would have made some sort of
| report or note. I only found out many years later people even
| doubted this phenomenon's existence.
| RappingBoomer wrote:
| in the 1960s in San Antonio Texas an orange sphere about the
| size of a baseball floated into my aunt's kitchen and vanished
| with an audible pop over her stove... researchers have been
| studying these things for decades in northern Norway...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hessdalen_lights
|
| they seem to be a product of interactions between the soil, the
| sun, the atmosphere and the Earth's magnetic field
| dark-star wrote:
| I read a lot about ball lightning in the past. And from what I
| gathered, there are a couple of different phenomena that are
| described as "ball lightning".
|
| The one that is most prominent in literature is that of a glowing
| ball that sometimes can pass through solid objects (windows,
| sometimes even walls) without any problems, and that stays a
| couple seconds to minutes.
|
| I think that in this case the best explanation is what Wikipedia
| describes as "Transcranial magnetic stimulation", i.e. a sort of
| hallucination created by electromagnetic stimulus in the brain,
| like an optical illusion. It has been shown that strong magnetic
| fields in the brain can cause "light-effects" to appear which
| stay for seconds to minutes and then vanish. Having seen what the
| EMP from a nearby lightning can do (like fry electronics), it's
| not a long stretch to think that it could cause some EMP-like
| effects in our brains too...
|
| Other phenomena, like the one that was filmed in China (I think?)
| are probably plasma discharges that are similar but unrelated to
| "classical" ball lightning.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| Since we're talking anomalous orb phenomena, there's been common
| sightings of floating corporeal "orbs" for lack of better term
| captured by consumer ring security cameras:
| https://microufostudy.medium.com/the-micro-ufo-phenomenon-d2...
|
| The article appears to have a wide sampling of videos featuring
| these orbs and make convincing claims they're not conventionally
| explainable (not bugs, camera artifacts, etc).
|
| Anyone with experience of such sightings?
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| There would have to be _extraordinary evidence_ to convince me
| that this is not dust or pollen floating very close to the lens
| and illuminated by the IR lights. This happens to my cameras
| quite often, and looks exactly like the first photo in that
| link.
|
| The fact that they've never been seen directly, only on camera,
| seems to back that up.
|
| The first video (actually, most of the videos) is very
| obviously an insect stuck to a spider web.
| squidproquo wrote:
| A lot of these instances seem to describe meteorites. I don't see
| a connection to lightning at all. Also, it's pretty crazy that
| the ball lightning phenomenon has been around for a while, yet it
| hasn't been replicated in a lab.
| plutonorm wrote:
| I think ball lightning is likely responsible for a lot of uap
| sightings. It may explain the phenomena to such a degree that we
| can consider it solved. But to explain ball lightning I think we
| are going to need some pretty unusual physics. My bet is on
| electromagnetic solitons in 3 dimensions, there are a few cool
| papers on the possibility. My other guess is that they are energy
| based life forms that aren't especially intelligent, drifting
| through looking for energy sources, hence the preoccupation with
| nuclear power sites. Half joking. Watch the film "nope" it's an
| excellent twist on the mystery.
| spjwebster wrote:
| At the risk of being ridiculed, when I was a lad growing up in
| the UK I saw something that I later learned might be described as
| ball lightning.
|
| It was late winter in the South West with overcast skies and
| melting snow on the ground, and looking out of the window of my
| bedroom across the street and into the opposite neighbour's front
| garden - which had been dug over to prepare the ground for
| vegetable planting in the spring - I saw a sphere of pinkish
| glowing light falling slowly to the ground. At first I thought it
| was a balloon, but looking at it more intently it seemed
| perfectly spherical and as it got close to the ground it hovered
| there for a good 5 or so seconds, illuminating the ground below.
| Then it completely vanished without a sound - no bang, no fire,
| just... gone. I ran out of the house and over to the neighbour's
| garden to see if I could find any remnants of whatever it was but
| there was nothing to be found except for what I noted at the time
| was a weird sharp smell and a small dish-shaped depression in the
| rough ground below where it vanished.
|
| I obviously can't say for sure that it was ball lightning, and I
| hadn't heard anything about such phenomena at that point so
| didn't describe it as such at the time, but every now and again
| when the topic comes up I can't help but see similarities between
| what I've seen and some of the reports. At the very least, it's a
| good excuse to retell this bizarre story from my childhood.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I've always assumed that ball lightning is a myth. Wikipedia
| describes it as "rare and unexplained".
|
| Why has there never been any video of it? Understandable before
| the ubiquitous smartphone. Suspicious, now.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| Right at the end of the article is mentions it being captured
| on film once by researchers.
|
| https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.11...
| tpmx wrote:
| Going through the wikipedia article is a hoot:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning
|
| I read it a few days ago while witnessing massive thunderstorms
| around my location.
|
| BTW: The people maintaining blitzortung.org are awesome. I
| suggest monitoring https://map.blitzortung.org/ if you're in a
| thunderstorm. It helped me figure out when it was safe to connect
| expensive equipment to mains power and the house TV antenna
| again.
| morninglight wrote:
| Yes, an excellent example of "citizen science".
|
| https://www.blitzortung.org/en/live_lightning_maps.php?map=0
|
| .
| tomcam wrote:
| They were known to fighter pilots as "foo fighters" in WWII
| DabbyDabberson wrote:
| My assumption is that foo fighters are a different but related
| phenomena.
|
| Foo fighters were likely not weather, but a product of the
| aircraft themselves.
|
| The most likely theory I've seen for foo fighters, is that the
| massive propellers on WWII era aircraft , spinning at high
| altitude in super dry air, collected a ton of static
| electricity, which caused a phenomena similar to ball
| lightning.
| tomcam wrote:
| Quite possibly right. Hard to reproduce in either case.
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(page generated 2022-09-01 23:01 UTC)