Re: Ball lightning ?

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Randy by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <randy-at-gte-dot-net>

OK, I'm gonna just spill my guts here. If you, dear reader, win the
Nobel Prize for Physics, kindly send me half of the money, and
mention me if you get the chance. I had intended to experiment
and prove or disprove the theory for myself, but it's not going to
happen any time soon, and I could get hit by a bus in the
meanwhile, so, here goes: <still on-topic, Terry :) >

From: http://www.ilpi-dot-com/msds/ref/activatedcharcoal.html

"A single gram of such material can have 400 to 1,200 square meters of 
surface area, 98% of it internal! "

They're talking about charcoal... carbon to be specific. Carbon being an 
integral part of the
"sooty smoke" needed to make MW oven plasmoids, which "may" be akin to ball 
lightning.

It is not hard for me to believe that a lightning stroke might occasionally 
liberate a fresh
batch of, say, a gram of carbon to the atmosphere. Probably Malcolm, or 
somebody, can
calculate the capacitance of 1200 M^2 of carbon vs. the atmosphere,
....and its resistance, and just boil it down
to a simple RC time constant...ummm... I can imagine *several* grams of 
fresh carbon
being aerosolized and electrically charged by a strike;
....methinks that a few thousand square yards of
charged surface area, via a poor conductor, COULD discharge a'la ball 
lightning, in an R/C
kinda way, for a humanly-comprehendable several seconds.
Yes, I realize that particles of a similar charge are going to busily be 
trying to get away
from each other... but there may be EM fields and such that my puny mind 
has not
allowed for, thus far.

Disclaimer: I "may be" "full of it"..... but just go and watch a summertime 
lightning storm here
in FL, and watch the clouds.... if it's not a giant R/C relaxation 
oscillator....you're not watching
closely enough, as one cloud and the next, and the next fire off....I was 
kinda surprised when
the Shuttle astronauts "discovered" that lightning storms have an effect on 
one another.....I
can imagine such stuff happening on a very small scale....

Randy



At 09:08 PM 1/6/02 -0700, you wrote:
>Original poster: "Randy by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" 
><randy-at-gte-dot-net>
>
>IIRC dwp, your are correct. There was NO coil involved, just whopping
>big raw DC. No idea who the person was.
>
>Regards,
>Randy
>
>At 04:55 PM 1/6/02 -0700, you wrote:
> >   I think that was Robert Golka.  Brief clip in another
> >         show.  NOT using the big coil.