Historical research guide · 0454 · 1996

A theory of ball lightning as an electric discharge

J J Lowke

In one minute

Ball lightning has been reported for centuries and explained a dozen ways — burning silicon, trapped microwaves, a knot of plasma holding itself together. John Lowke, at Australia’s CSIRO, takes a different route: he treats the ball as an ordinary electric discharge in air and does the arithmetic. Solving the equations that govern how electrons and ions move, together with Poisson’s equation for the electric field those same charges create, he gets a discharge that does not sit still. It flickers, restriking itself over and over on a scale of millionths of a second. And what keeps it alight is not fuel stored inside the ball. It is an electric field outside it — the charge a lightning strike dumps into the ground, draining away along whatever conducting paths the earth happens to offer. One picture, Lowke argues, then delivers four things at once: how the ball forms, how long it lasts, where its energy comes from, and why it moves the way it does.

Connection

Chapter 9 treats glowing spheres in air as physical objects with a power supply rather than as stories, and this is that question worked in the language of discharge physics — what field, what current, what circuit. Chapter 1 gains a rung on its evidence ladder, because a driving field in the ground is something an instrument can be pointed at. Read it beside Alexander Keul’s ledger of trained-observer sightings at /library/stm-48b6e644d4, and beside Lowke’s own earlier and later attempts at /library/stm-807219a83b and /library/stm-7f78f41fde.

From the source

Ball lightning is an electric discharge, and not a steady one: the model has it varying continuously on a microsecond time scale, striking and restriking rather than glowing evenly for the seconds a witness reports.Title; Abstract, first sentence
The result is derived rather than asserted, from solutions of the electron and ion transport equations taken together with Poisson’s equation — the standard machinery of gas-discharge physics, applied to a free-floating ball of air.Abstract, first sentence
The discharge is corona-like, and it is sustained by electric fields associated with charges from a lightning strike dispersing along preferred conducting paths in the earth. The power supply is outside the ball, not inside it.Abstract, second sentence
One mechanism accounts for four separate puzzles at once — the formation of ball lightning, its lifetime, its energy source and its motion — which is the test a ball-lightning theory has to pass and most do not.Abstract, third sentence
Putting the energy source in the ground makes the theory checkable in a way a self-contained plasmoid is not: the observation that would settle it is a measurement of the field and the current in the earth beneath a ball, and of how long that drainage lasts compared with the seconds a ball is seen to survive.Abstract, second and third sentences

The way in

https://doi.org/10.1088/0022-3727/29/5/018

Historical source-access record. This guide links to the original; it does not reproduce the paper text.

LICENCE. Published as Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics 29, 1237-1244 (1996). The article is free to read at the publisher — Unpaywall and OpenAlex both return oa_status bronze — but bronze means the publisher opened the page, not that it granted re-use, and the licence field on both records is null. No Creative Commons statement was found on the publisher record. So this sheet carries the summary, the claims and the author’s own abstract, and sends the reader to the full text at the source. TEXT. The publisher’s PDF is behind a bot wall that refused every fetch attempt on 2026-09-08, so the abstract reproduced below is the publisher’s own abstract as carried in the OpenAlex record for this DOI, and the claims are read from it. The locators therefore point at the abstract rather than at interior sections. Lowke wrote from CSIRO in Australia; the companion sheets are his 1969 paper with Uman and Liebermann at /library/stm-807219a83b and his 2020 paper with Heil, Tam and Murphy at /library/stm-7f78f41fde, and the observational ledger this theory has to satisfy is Alexander Keul’s at /library/stm-48b6e644d4.

How to cite it

J J Lowke (1996) A theory of ball lightning as an electric discharge doi:10.1088/0022-3727/29/5/018

Where it sits in the curriculum

Plasmoids, charge clusters and the orbs