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Ball lightning : a popular guide to a longstanding mystery in atmospheric electricity
Ball lightning is an enigma. These luminous objects that appear occasionally during thunderstorms and can reach several meters in diameter have been a mystery to science for about 200 years. Despite several thousands of reported observations, their nature is still unknown. In this book, well documented cases of ball lightning are described and used to unravel some aspects of this mysterious form of atmospheric electricity. Throughout the book, the author discusses the various facets of the problem in an accessible but rigorous style, delivering a readable and informative text that will captivate the curious reader. He finally reaches the surprising conclusion that the solution to this puzzle may have been hidden in plain sight for many years.
Book
Life as the Explanation of the Measurement Problem
This study argues that a biological cell, a dissipative structure, is the smallest agent capable of processing quantum information through its triangulated, holographic sphere of perception , where this mechanism has been extended by natural evolution to endo and exosemiosis in multicellular organisms and further to the language of Homo sapiens . Thus, life explains the measurement problem of quantum theory within the framework of the holographic principle, emergent gravity, and emergent dimensionality. Each Planck triangle on a black hole surface corresponds to a qubit in an equal superposition, attaining known bounds on the products of its energies and orthogonalization interval. Black holes generate entropy variation shells through the solid-angle correspondence. The entropic work introduces the bounds on the number of active Planck triangles dependent on the information capacity of the black hole generator. The velocity and dissipativity bounds and the bounds on the theoretical probabilities for active, energy-carrying Planck triangles were derived. In particular, this study shows that black holes, Turing machines, and viruses cannot assume the role of an observer. The entropy variation shells and black-body objects may hint at solutions to ball lightning and sonoluminescence unexplained physical spherical phenomena. “It is also possible that we learned that the principal problem is no longer the fight with the adversities of nature but the difficulty of understanding ourselves if we want to survive” [1].
Journal Article
Ball lightning
When Chen's parents are incinerated before his eyes by a blast of ball lightning, he devotes his life to cracking the secret of this mysterious natural phenomenon. His search takes him to stormy mountaintops, an experimental military weapons lab, and an old Soviet science station. The more he learns, the more he comes to realize that ball lightning is just the tip of an entirely new frontier. While Chen's quest for answers gives purpose to his lonely life, it also pits him against soldiers and scientists with motives of their own: a beautiful army major with an obsession with dangerous weaponry, and a physicist who has no place for ethical considerations in his single-minded pursuit of knowledge.
Book
Ball Lightning as a Profound Manifestation of Dark Matter Physics
Ball lightning (BL) has been observed for centuries. There are a large number of books, review articles, and original scientific papers devoted to different aspects of the BL phenomenon. Yet, the basic features of this phenomenon have never been explained by known physics. The main problem is the source which could power the dynamics of BL. We advocate the idea that dark matter (DM) in the form of axion quark nuggets (AQNs) made of standard model quarks and gluons (similar to the old idea of Witten’s strangelets) could internally generate the required power. The AQN model was invented long ago without any relation to BL physics. It was invented with a single motivation to explain the observed similarity, ΩDM∼Ωvisible, between visible and DM components. This relation represents a very generic feature of this framework, not sensitive to any parameters of the construction. However, with the same set of parameters being fixed long ago, this model is capable of addressing the key elements of the BL phenomenology, including the source of the energy powering the BL events. In particular, we argue that the visible size of BL, its typical life time, the frequency of its appearance, etc., are all consistent with the suggested proposal that BL represents a profound manifestation of DM physics represented by AQN objects. In this work, we limit ourselves to the analysis of the thunderstorm-related BL phenomena, though weather-unrelated BL events are also known to occur. We also formulate a number of specific possible tests which can refute or unambiguously substantiate this unorthodox proposal on the nature of BL.
Journal Article
On the nature of ball lightning
The author proposes a model of ball lightning based on a mechanistic interpretation of John Wheeler's ideas. It is assumed that ball lightning is a quasi-particle that has the Planck mass and consists of closed contours, which in turn are based on the magnetic and gravity force balance. These contours are hard packed in a small volume of ball lightning, forming a multilayer capacitor containing a substantial charge and electrostatic energy. This paper provides calculations of characteristic parameters of ball lightning, which are well consistent with its phenomenology.
Journal Article
Explosions of Ball Lightning inside Enclosed Spaces
According to observations, the energy density contained inside ball lightning can reach 1010 J/m3, and its charge can range from 10−3 to 10−1 C. Witnesses often report seeing moving sparks about one millimeter in size inside the ball lightning shell. When the ball lightning shell ruptures, charge carriers fly out of it in the form of a sheaf of sparks. For many years, the press has published reports of the destruction of houses inside of which a ball lightning explosion had occurred. These events remained unexplained for a long time. This article, for the first time in the world, provides a physical explanation of these events. This article is based on the ball lightning model developed by the authors. According to this model, ball lightning consists of an ensemble of positively charged elements (dynamic electric capacitors) located inside a spherical shell of polarized water molecules. The dynamic capacitor is a system of cyclically moving electrons and ions. The expansion of this capacitor is restrained by the compression force of the ball lightning shell in the non-uniform electric field of the ball lightning core. The model allows us to find a physical explanation for most of the observed properties of ball lightning. Using the example of a simplified model of ball lightning (when the contribution of the kinetic energy of the dynamic capacitors was not taken into account), an analysis of the forces acting inside ball lightning was carried out. It was shown that when the shell of ball lightning is destroyed, the charges emitted from the core remain on the walls of the room or on loose objects for some time. The Coulomb force of the repulsion of charges turns out to be large enough to squeeze out the walls of a building or throw a heavy object or person out of the house.
Journal Article
On physical investigation of ball lightnings
Explanations for the long lifetime of spherically symmetric objects in nature and the short lifetime of laboratory plasma are given. A qualitative description of the relativistic model of ball lightning is also given, which is a spherical electric region with strong electric and magnetic fields. The plasma temperature in the zone of the ball-lightning generation is measured by the spectroscopic method. A large ball lightning, the maximum diameter of which is equal to one meter and which stands in the region of its generation, is also registered after the formation and departure of a high-energy ball lightning. The reason for the low emissive power in the optical range characteristic for the atmospheric ball lightning is explained by the absence of electron transitions in the outer proton-containing shell. The absence of electrical breakdown at ultrahigh electric field between the core and the outer shell of the ball lightning and its destruction at the moment when the resulting force becomes nonzero are also explained.
Journal Article
A REVIEW OF BALL LIGHTNING MODELS
Ball lightning is a natural phenomenon that occurs in the atmosphere. However due to its brevity and rarity, its occurrence is not well understood. Three models based on electromagnetic properties are discussed in this paper to explain the rare phenomenon of ball lightning. The first model incorporates the idea of electron bunching, electrons moving with different velocities. This creates a plasma bubble by recombining electrons with ionized gas to form plasma that is stabilized by a standing microwave. The second model explains the idea of streamers being tangled and linked in a magnetic field while stabilized by the conservation of helicity. The third model is a lab created skyrmion that when evaluated exhibits qualities similar to ball lightning.
Journal Article
Surface Tension of a Cloud of Charged Microparticles in a Gas-Discharge Plasma
A model for calculating the surface tension coefficient of a spherical cloud of charged microparticles in a plasma is proposed. The coefficients of the surface tension of Coulomb spheres obtained in a low-pressure glow discharge in neon at a temperature of 77 K for particles with a diameter of 4 μm and a temperature of 295 K for particles with a diameter of 2 μm are calculated. The potential energy of microparticles on the surface of a sphere is determined. In the calculations, a hydrodynamic model of a positive column with charged microparticles is used. The obtained values of the surface tension coefficient are compared with the data obtained by other authors for ball lightnings. A hypothesis is proposed for the formation of Coulomb spheres in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Journal Article
Simulation of the ball lightning temperature field
The article is devoted to such a natural phenomenon as ball lightning. The relevance of the work is due to the fact that the phenomenon itself is widespread, but in itself has not been sufficiently studied. In it, the ball lightning is considered as a plasma ball. The main purpose of the work is mathematical modeling of the lightning temperature field taking into account radiation heat transfer. Based on the obtained result, an analysis of the behavior of the temperature field was carried out.
Journal Article