Re: Ball lightning - Terry's thoughts....

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: William Beaty <billb@xxxxxxxxxx>

On Sat, 6 Aug 2005, Tesla list wrote:

> My idea was that ball lighting is "super heated" "stuff".  Wood,
> plastic, dirt,...  It does not matter much....

It's quite easy to produce this kind of "stuff BL" inside a microwave
oven.  http://amasci.com/weird/microexp.html

I haven't heard of anyone trying to get one to move outside of the oven
though. (If we make too big a hole in the oven, we spoil the Q, and the
e-field value drops.)

However, if we could persuade a microwave oven ball lightning to exit out
of a small hole...  what if the oven was near an operating TC secondary,
so there was a fiercely intense 100KHz e-field filling that space?  Maybe
it would be enough to keep the BL alight.

One thing I've noticed:  microwave oven BL in a plastic bag of argon
behaves quite differently than the buring-carbon BLs.  The carbon BLs look
like little fluttering flames.  The argon BLs look like flat-bottom
spheres.  (But perhaps the oven's fan makes a difference, since the argon
BLs were made inside an enclosed space without the fan turbulence.)

If I mess with this, I'll attempt to make BLs which are composed of
single-atom vapor such as sodium or carbon (or just argon,)  not made from
nitrogen and oxygen which can fall together as molecules and suck out all
the energy.

In other words...  the process that allows those huge long arcs to exist
in pure argon might also play a critical in at least one type of Ball
Lightning.


REALLY off topic:

If you fill an unstoppered flask with pure argon, stand a pointy piece of
aluminum foil in the center, then zap it in your microwave oven, for a
couple of seconds it makes Plasma Globe from Heck, with millions of
brilliant purple/white lightning bolts radiating out of the aluminum foil
point.


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William J. Beaty                            SCIENCE HOBBYIST website
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