A photo purportedly depicting natural ball lightning, taken in 1987 by a student in
Nagano, Japan.
is a debated and controversial
atmospheric electrical phenomenon. The term refers to reports of
luminous, usually spherical objects which vary from pea-sized to several meters in diameter. It is sometimes associated with
thunderstorms, but lasts considerably longer than the split-second flash of a
lightning bolt.
Laboratory experiments have produced effects that are visually similar to reports of ball lightning, but it is presently unknown whether these are actually related to any naturally occurring phenomenon. Scientific data on natural ball lightning is scarce owing to its infrequency and unpredictability. The presumption of its existence is based on reported public sightings, and has therefore produced somewhat inconsistent findings. Given inconsistencies and the lack of reliable data, the true nature of ball lightning is still unknown.
Until recently, ball lightning was often regarded as a fantasy or a
hoax, but some serious scientific discussions and theories have attempted to explain it.
Historical accounts
In a 1960 study 5% of the US population reported having witnessed ball lightning.
Another study analyzed reports of 10,000 cases.
A contemporary woodcut of the 1638 thunderstorm at Widecombe
The Great Thunderstorm
One of the earliest possible descriptions was reported during
The Great Thunderstorm at a church in
Widecombe-in-the-Moor,
Devon, in
England, on 21 October 1638. Four people died and approximately 60 were injured when, during a severe storm, an 8' (2.4m) ball of fire was described as striking and entering the church, nearly destroying it. Large stones from the church walls were hurled into the ground and through large wooden beams. The ball of fire allegedly smashed the pews and many windows, and filled the church with a foul
sulfurous odor and dark, thick smoke.
The ball of fire reportedly divided into two segments, one exiting through a window by smashing it open, the other disappearing somewhere inside the church. The explanation at the time, because of the fire and sulfur smell, was that the ball of fire was "the devil" or the "flames of hell". Later, some blamed the entire incident on two people who had been playing cards in the pew during the sermon, thereby incurring God's wrath.
Georg Richmann
A 1753 report depicts ball lightning as being lethal, when Professor
Georg Richmann of
Saint Petersburg,
Russia, created a kite-flying apparatus similar to
Benjamin Franklin's proposal a year earlier. Richmann was attending a meeting of the
Academy of Sciences when he heard thunder, and ran home with his engraver to capture the event for posterity. While the experiment was underway, ball lightning appeared and traveled down the string, struck Richmann's forehead and killed him. The ball left a red spot on Richmann's forehead, his shoes were blown open, and his clothing was singed. His engraver was knocked unconscious. The doorframe of the room was split and the door was torn from its hinges.
HMS Warren Hastings
An English journal reported that during an 1809 storm, three "balls of fire" appeared and "attacked" the British ship HMS Warren Hastings. The crew watched one ball descend, killing a man on deck and setting the main mast on fire. A crewman went out to retrieve the fallen body and was struck by a second ball, which knocked him back and left him with mild burns. A third man was killed by contact with the third ball. Crew members reported a persistent, sickening
sulfur smell afterward.
Ebenezer Cobham Brewer
Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, in his 1864 US edition of
A Guide to the Scientific Knowledge of Things Familiar, discussed "globular lightning". He describes it as slow-moving balls of fire or explosive gas that sometimes fall to the earth or run along the ground during a thunderstorm. He said that the balls sometimes split into smaller balls and may explode "like a
cannon".
A 19th century depiction of ball lightning.
Tsar Nicholas II
Tsar Nicholas II, the last Emperor of Russia, reported witnessing what he called "a fiery ball" while in the company of his grandfather, Tsar
Alexander II: "Once my parents were away," recounted the Tsar, "and I was at the
all-night vigil with my grandfather in the small church in
Alexandria. During the service there was a powerful thunderstorm, streaks of lightning flashed one after the other, and it seemed as if the peals of thunder would shake even the church and the whole world to its foundations. Suddenly it became quite dark, a blast of wind from the open door blew out the flame of the candles which were lit in front of the
iconostasis, there was a long clap of thunder, louder than before, and I suddenly saw a fiery ball flying from the window straight towards the head of the Emperor. The ball (it was of lightning) whirled around the floor, then passed the chandelier and flew out through the door into the park. My heart froze, I glanced at my grandfather - his face was completely calm. He
crossed himself just as calmly as he had when the fiery ball had flown near us, and I felt that it was unseemly and not courageous to be frightened as I was . . . After the ball had passed through the whole church, and suddenly gone out through the door, I again looked at my grandfather. A faint smile was on his face, and he nodded his head at me. My panic disappeared, and from that time I had no more fear of storms."
Aleister Crowley
British occultist
Aleister Crowley reported witnessing what he referred to as "globular electricity" during a thunderstorm on
Lake Pasquaney in
New Hampshire in 1916. He was sheltered in a small cottage when he "noticed, with what I can only describe as calm amazement, that a dazzling globe of electric fire, apparently between six and twelve inches (15 - 30 cm) in diameter, was stationary about six inches below and to the right of my right knee. As I looked at it, it exploded with a sharp report quite impossible to confuse with the continuous turmoil of the lightning, thunder and hail, or that of the lashed water and smashed wood which was creating a pandemonium outside the cottage. I felt a very slight shock in the middle of my right hand, which was closer to the globe than any other part of my body."
Other accounts
- On 30 April 1877, a ball of lightning entered the Golden Temple at Amritsar, India, and exited through a side door. Several people observed the ball, and the incident is inscribed on the front wall of Darshani Deodhi.
- In July 1907 the Cape Naturaliste Lighthouse in Western Australia was hit by ball lightning. Lighthouse keeper Patrick Baird was in the tower at the time and was knocked unconscious. His daughter Ethel recorded the event.
- Pilots in World War II described an unusual phenomenon for which ball lightning has been suggested as an explanation. The pilots saw small balls of light moving in strange trajectories, which came to be referred to as foo fighters.
- Submariners in WWII gave the most frequent and consistent accounts of small ball lightning in the confined submarine atmosphere. There are repeated accounts of inadvertent production of floating explosive balls when the battery banks were switched in/out, especially if mis-switched or when the highly inductive electrical motors were mis-connected or disconnected. An attempt later to duplicate those balls with a surplus submarine battery resulted in several failures and an explosion.
- On 6 August 1994 a ball of lightning went through a closed window in Uppsala, Sweden, leaving a circular hole with a diameter of 5 centimeters. The incident was witnessed by residents in the area, and was recorded by a lightning strike tracking system on the Division for Electricity and Lightning Research at Uppsala University.
Characteristics
Descriptions of ball lightning vary wildly. It has been described as moving up and down, sideways or in unpredictable trajectories, hovering and moving with or against the wind; attracted to, unaffected by, or repelled from buildings, people, cars and other objects. Some accounts describe it as moving through solid masses of wood or metal without effect, while others describe it as destructive and melting or burning those substances. Its appearance has also been linked to
power lines as well as during thunderstorms and also calm weather. Ball lightning has been described as
transparent, translucent, multicolored, evenly lit, radiating flames, filaments or sparks, with shapes that vary between spheres, ovals, tear-drops, rods or disk-like.
The balls have been reported to disperse in many different ways, such as suddenly vanishing, gradually dissipating, absorption into an object, "popping," exploding loudly, or even exploding with force, which is sometimes reported as damaging. Accounts also vary on their alleged danger to humans, from lethal to harmless.
Laboratory experiments
Scientists have long attempted to produce ball lightning in laboratory experiments. While some experiments have produced effects that are visually similar to reports of natural ball lightning, it has not yet been determined whether there is any correlation.
Nikola Tesla reportedly was able to artificially produce ~1.5" (3.8 cm) balls and made some demonstrations of his ability, but he was really interested in higher voltages and powers, and remote transmission of power, so the balls he made were just a curiosity.
An international scientific group holds regular symposia on ball lightning, called the "International Symposium on Ball Lightning" or ISBL: , , . The most recent symposium took place in
Kaliningrad,
Russia in 2008. A related group uses the generic name "Unconventional Plasmas".
A demonstration of the water discharge experiment.
Water discharge experiments
Some scientific groups, including the
Max Planck Institute, have reportedly produced a ball lightning-type effect by discharging a high-voltage
capacitor in a tank of water.
Home microwave oven experiments
Many modern experiments involve using a microwave oven to produce small rising glowing balls, often referred to as "plasma balls".
Generally, the experiments are conducted by placing a lit or recently extinguished match or other small object in a microwave oven. The burnt portion of the object flares up into a large ball of fire, while "plasma balls" can be seen floating near the ceiling of the oven chamber. The effect is caused by electricity arcing between the conductive carbon particles in the soot, similar to the way electricity arcs between the tines of a fork. This can damage the oven by leaving burn marks and causing high-voltage electrical discharge back into the oven's
magnetron.
Some experiments describe covering the match with an inverted glass jar, which contains both the flame and the balls so that they will not damage the chamber walls. Other experimenters report that substituting a nickel for the match produces better results. Some experimenters have posted instructions, photos, and videos of these experiments.
The plasma balls vanish about 30 ms after the microwave power is turned off, leaving uncertainty as to whether these are related to ball lightning or are independent phenomenae. Experiments by Eli Jerby and Vladimir Dikhtyar in Israel revealed that microwave plasma balls are made up of nanoparticles with an average radius of 25 nm. The Israeli team demonstrated the phenomenon with copper, salts, water and carbon.
Silicon experiments
Experiments in 2007 involved shocking
silicon wafers with electricity, which vaporizes the silicon and induces
oxidation in the vapors. The visual effect can be described as small glowing, sparkling orbs that roll around a surface. Two Brazilian scientists,
Antonio Pavão and
Gerson Paiva of the
Federal University of Pernambuco have reportedly consistently made small long-lasting balls using this method. These experiments stemmed from the theory that ball lightning is actually oxidized silicon vapors
(see vaporized silicon hypothesis, below).
Possible scientific explanations
An early attempt to explain ball lightning was recorded by
Nikola Tesla in 1904, but there is at present no widely-accepted explanation for ball lightning. Several theories have been advanced, however, since the phenomenon was brought into the scientific realm by the
French Academy scientist
François Arago.
Vaporized silicon hypothesis
This hypothesis suggests that ball lightning consists of vaporized silicon burning through
oxidation. When lightning strikes earth's silica-rich soil, the silicon could be instantly vaporized, the vapor itself condensing and burning slowly in the oxygen in the surrounding air. A recently published experimental investigation of this effect by evaporating pure silicon with an electric arc reported producing "luminous balls with lifetime in the order of seconds". Videos of this experiment have been made available.
Nanobattery hypothesis
Oleg Meshcheryakov suggests that ball lightning is made of composite nano or submicrometre particles, each particle constituting a
battery. A surface discharge shorts these batteries, resulting in a current which forms the ball. His model is described as an
aerosol, but not
aerogel, model that explains all the observable properties and processes of ball lightning.
Black hole hypothesis
Another hypothesis is that some extreme ball lightning is actually the passage of microscopic
primordial black holes through the Earth's atmosphere as proposed by
Mario Rabinowitz in Astrophysics and Space Science journal in 1999; and earlier. Inspired by M. Fitzgerald’s account of ball lightning on 6 August 1868, in
Ireland that lasted 20 minutes and left a 6 meter square hole, a 90 meter long trench, a second trench 25 meters long, and a small cave in the
peat bog, Pace VanDevender, a plasma physicist at
Sandia National Laboratories in
Albuquerque, New Mexico, and his team found depressions consistent with Fitzgerald’s report and inferred that the evidence is inconsistent with thermal (chemical or nuclear) and electrostatic effects. An electromagnetically levitated, compact mass of >20,000 kg would produce the reported effects but requires a density of > 2000 times the density of gold, which implies a miniature black hole. He and his team found a second event in the peat-bog witness plate from 1982 and are currently trying to geolocate electromagnetic emission consistent with the hypothesis. His colleagues at the institute agreed that, implausible though the hypothesis seemed, it was worthy of their attention.
Other hypotheses
Several other theories have been proposed to explain ball lightning:
- Spinning electric dipole hypothesis. A 1976 article by V. G. Endean postulated that ball lightning could be described as an electric field vector spinning in the microwave frequency region.
- Electrostatic Leyden jar models. Stanley Singer discussed (1971) this type of hypothesis and suggested that the electrical recombination time would be too short for the ball lightning lifetimes often reported.
- J. Pace VanDevender separates extreme ball lightning of the highly energetic violent kind, and proposes a theory of neutrinos and heavy neutrinos.
- Hallucinations associated with epileptic seizures. In a peer reviewed publication Cooray and Cooray (2008) stated that the features of hallucinations experienced by patients having seizures in the occipital lobe are similar to the observed features of ball lightning. The study also showed that the rapidly changing magnetic field of a close lightning flash has a strength which is large enough to excite the neurons in the brain strengthening the possibility of lightning-induced seizure in the occipital lobe of a person located close to a lightning strike establishing the connection between epileptic hallucination mimicking ball lightning and thunderstorms. The authors suggest that some of the reported ball lightning observations are hallucinations experienced during the epileptic seizures in the occipital lobe.
In popular culture
Mythology
- Among the ancients of Japanese mythology, there is a myth that ball lightning is the wrath of the thunder god, Raijin. Another shinto explanation is an apparition of the thunder being Raiju.
- M. l'abbé de Tressan, in Mythology compared with history: or, the fables of the ancients elucidated from historical records:
...during a storm which endangered the ship Argo, fires were seen to play round the heads of the Tyndarides, and the instant after the storm ceased. From that time, those fires which frequently appear on the surface of the ocean were called the fire of Castor and Pollux. When two were seen at the same time, it announced the return of calm, when only one, it was the presage of a dreadful storm. This species of fire is frequently seen by sailors, and is a species of ignis fatuus. (page 417)
- Guyanese Mythology holds that the ole higue, the Guyanese form of a human vampire, capable of discarding her skin takes the form of an old woman living in a community. At night she transforms herself into a ball of fire, flies from her own house into the sky and then lands on the roof of another house where there is a baby in a cradle underneath a sheet whose blood she will suck dry and then go home.
Literature
- An early fictional reference to ball lightning appears in a children's book set in the 19th century by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The books are considered historical fiction, but the author always insisted they were descriptive of actual events in her life. In Wilder's description, three separate balls of lightning appear during a winter blizzard near a cast iron stove in the family's kitchen. They are described as appearing near the stovepipe, then rolling across the floor, only to disappear as the mother (Caroline Ingalls) chases them with a willow-branch broom.
- In Pynchon's Against the Day, Merle Rideout, a photographer and lightning-rod salesman, befriends Skip, a telepathically communicative manifestation of ball lightning.
- In Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth," the protagonists encounter ball lightning while crossing an underground sea. It magnetized the iron on their raft and reversed the poles of their compass, which made them unknowingly go south instead of north.
Film
- In the Russian film Burnt by the Sun a crackling lightning ball appears at several key moments throughout the picture. It passes through rooms, sometimes causing damage such as cracking the glass used to cover family photographs. At one point a lightning ball explodes in the forest, igniting a tree.
See also
