Ball lightning, bottled.
January 15th, 2007
Brazilian scientists have recreated one of the most freaking awesome of natural phenomena, ball lightning, under lab conditions. New Scientist reports that the researchers theorised:
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.
There is a video of the phenomenon here.
Entry Filed under: Awesome Science Videos
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1 Comment Add your own
1. Erich J. Knight | January 15th, 2007 at 6:57 pm
I thought your readers would be interested in looking at these energy technologies, and EPS’s theoretic base for ball lighting :
Ball Lightning Explained as a Stable Plasma Toroid
http://www.electronpowersystems.com/Images/Ball%20Lightning%20Explained.pdf
Aneutronic Fusion: Here I am not talking about the big science ITER project taking thirty years, but the several small alternative plasma fusion efforts.
There are three companies pursuing hydrogen-boron plasma toroid fusion, Paul Koloc, Prometheus II, Eric Lerner, Focus Fusion and Clint Seward of Electron Power Systems
Vincent Page (a technology officer at GE!!) gave a presentation at the 05 6th symposium on current trends in international fusion research , which high lights the need to fully fund three different approaches to P-B11 fusion
He quotes costs and time to development of P-B11 Fusion as tens of million $, and years verses the many decades and ten Billion plus $ projected for ITER and other “Big” science efforts
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