Ball Lightning Investigations
V. L. Bychkov · A. I. Nikitin · G. C. Dijkhuis
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In one page
Ball lightning has been reported for centuries and studied with instruments for about two, and this is where the Russian and Dutch strands of that work are set down together. Vladimir Bychkov of Moscow State University, Anatoly Nikitin of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Gerard Dijkhuis of Rotterdam give it a hundred and seventy-three pages. The first part, by Bychkov and Nikitin, is a general review running from Arago’s report of 1838 to the present day: what witnesses describe, what laboratories have managed to make, and which theories survive contact with both. The three parts after it are each author’s own model, printed separately rather than blended into a consensus. Bychkov works from condensed, melted, burning material; Nikitin treats the object as an electrically charged body held together as a dynamic electric capacitor, which is what stores its energy and what lets it hover; Dijkhuis builds it from concentric shells and spherical vortex crystals in a strongly coupled plasma. Three answers, published side by side, each owing the same observations.
Why it matters hereChapter 9 needs the ball-lightning literature to be visible as a literature — a long observational record, a laboratory programme, and competing physical models that can be told apart by measurement — and this chapter is the single densest place that whole picture is assembled. It is also where the plasmoid line and the ball-lightning line meet, because Bostick’s laboratory plasmoids are cited here as part of the explanation rather than as a neighbouring subject.
What it claims
01The chapter’s own statement of what it is. In the authors’ words, a review of ball lightning research together with the theoretical models of three different authors; the general review covers investigations from 1838 until the present day and discusses observation data, experimental modelling and theoretical approaches. Section 6.1 is written by Bychkov and Nikitin, and sections 6.2, 6.3 and 6.4 are by Bychkov, Nikitin and Dijkhuis respectively. The starting date is not rhetorical: François Arago’s 1838 survey of thunder for the Bureau des Longitudes is the first item in the bibliography.Authors’ abstract, publisher chapter record; pages 201 to 373
Published and peer-reviewed02Three models, named by the chapter’s own keyword list rather than by any summary of them. Combustion, condensed melted hot material and explosion belong to Bychkov’s section; dynamic electric capacitor, electrically charged object, charged eigenstate, electron ring, protons, vacuum cavity and levitation belong to Nikitin’s; concentric gear shells and spherical vortex crystals belong to Dijkhuis’. Reading those three lists side by side is the fastest honest picture of how differently the same object can be explained.Chapter keyword list, publisher chapter record
Published and peer-reviewed03The observational base under the review is archived case data, not anecdote. The bibliography draws on national and regional collections — Alexander Keul’s German and European statistics and his lightning-detection-system correlation work, the Amirov and Bychkov observational database, Stakhanov’s photographic archive, Toselli and Fedele’s Italian project, Japanese survey work by Ofuruton and Ohtsuki — and on physical traces, including the examination of a window pane exposed to ball lightning by Shelkunov, Nikitin and colleagues, and the extreme County Donegal event of August 1868 reconstructed by the VanDevender group.Chapter reference list, publisher chapter record
Published and peer-reviewed04The laboratory programme the review covers is real and published. Its bibliography runs from Kapitsa’s 1955 proposal that a high-frequency field sustains the object, through plasma fireballs formed by microwave interference in air by Ohtsuki and Ofuruton in Nature in 1991 and fireball ejection from a molten hot spot by localised microwaves by Dikhtyar and Jerby in Physical Review Letters in 2006, to ball-lightning-like luminous balls produced by electrical discharge in silicon by Paiva and colleagues in 2007, the nanoparticle-oxidation route of Abrahamson and Dinnis in Nature in 2000, the Gatchina discharge over an electrolyte surface, and long-living plasmoids from an atmospheric water discharge reported by Versteegh and colleagues in 2008.Chapter reference list, publisher chapter record
Published and peer-reviewed05The plasmoid line runs straight through this chapter. Bostick’s two plasmoid papers of 1956 and 1957 and Shafranov’s equilibrium magneto-hydrodynamic configurations of 1957 are cited here as part of the ball-lightning explanation, alongside Finkelstein and Rubinstein’s 1964 treatment and Koloc’s formed PLASMAK results. So is Dijkhuis’ own experimental thread — a threshold current for fireball generation, published in the Journal of Applied Physics in 1982, and a scaling law for fusion power from ball lightning presented in 1988.Chapter reference list, publisher chapter record; Dijkhuis section 6.4
Published and peer-reviewed06What to watch. The chapter’s own architecture is the honest statement of where the field stood in 2010: one shared review, then three separate models that are not reconciled. What would settle it is a laboratory object that reproduces the reported lifetime, energy density, mobility and ability to pass through glass together rather than one at a time — which is exactly what the experimental programme in the bibliography is reaching for. The chapter itself is closed, so the numbers inside those three models are not yet on this site; any reader who can open pages 201 to 373 can supply them.Rights note above; chapter structure as stated in the authors’ abstract
What to watch
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3212-6_6WHAT THIS PAGE IS WRITTEN FROM. Chapter 6, pages 201 to 373, of ‘The Atmosphere and Ionosphere: Dynamics, Processes and Monitoring’, edited by Vladimir Bychkov, Gennady Golubkov and Anatoly Nikitin, in the Springer series Physics of Earth and Space Environments, 2010; print ISBN 978-90-481-3211-9, electronic ISBN 978-90-481-3212-6. At one hundred and seventy-three pages it is a monograph inside an edited volume rather than an ordinary chapter. RIGHTS AND TEXT. The chapter is closed access, the Springer record carries no open licence, and no text of it is reproduced on this page. What was read for this sheet, on 2026-09-08, is the publisher’s own chapter record: the authors’ abstract in full, the chapter’s declared keyword list, the author affiliation, the page range, the book’s title, editors and identifiers, and the chapter’s complete reference list as the publisher displays it. Every claim below says which of those it comes from. The reference list is the strongest of them, because a review chapter’s bibliography is a reliable map of what the review covers; it is used here only for what it can honestly support — which lines of work are treated — and never for what the authors conclude about them. When the chapter itself can be read, this sheet should be rewritten from it. AFFILIATION AS PUBLISHED: V. L. Bychkov, Physical Electronics Chair, Physical Department, M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow. The same first two authors returned to the subject in the same Springer series four years later, as ‘Ball Lightning: A New Step in Understanding’, pages 201 to 367 of the 2014 volume.
How to cite it
V. L. Bychkov, A. I. Nikitin, G. C. Dijkhuis (2010) Ball Lightning Investigations. doi:10.1007/978-90-481-3212-6_6
Where it sits in the curriculum