Historical research guide · 0485 · 2014
Ball Lightning: A New Step in Understanding
Vladimir L. Bychkov · Anatoly I. Nikitin
In one minute
Ball lightning is the atmospheric phenomenon almost everyone has heard of and almost nobody has instrumented. Vladimir Bychkov and Anatoly Nikitin use one hundred and sixty-seven pages of a Springer volume to pull the field’s three strands together: what witnesses saw, what the objects did to matter, and what model can hold all of it at once. They describe forty-six cases in which ball lightning affected people, and conclude the harm comes from electric current passing through the body and from high-frequency radio energy acting on tissue in close contact. Fifty cases in and around aircraft lead them to a stronger claim — that these objects can form at high altitude and get into aeroplanes through openings, including openings they make themselves. Round holes in window glass are analysed and then reproduced in the laboratory. From photographs and video the authors argue the object carries an uncompensated electric charge that leaks away as a corona discharge around it. Their own model has finely divided silicon burning inside a silicon-oxide shell.
Connection
Chapter 9 treats luminous, self-holding balls of plasma as real objects with measurable properties rather than as folklore, and this is the single densest assembly of that evidence in the literature — case data, material damage, laboratory analogues and models in one place. The aircraft strand matters directly: fifty incidents in and around aeroplanes, and the authors’ conclusion that the objects can form at altitude, is the observational ground under chapter 1’s standard of evidence.
From the source
Forty-six cases of ball lightning affecting people are described and analysed, and the authors determine that the main affecting factors are an electric current passing through the body of the person affected, and high-frequency radio irradiation acting on the tissues of a person in close contact with the object. That is a physical mechanism for the injuries, drawn from the case record rather than assumed.Publisher’s chapter abstract, second and third sentences
Fifty cases of ball lightning occurring inside and near airplanes allow the authors to conclude that ball lightning can be formed at high altitudes, and that it is capable of entering planes through existing apertures, or through apertures made by the object itself. The aircraft-incident line of work behind this is the analysis by Doe, Keul and Bychkov presented to the American Geophysical Union in 2009.Publisher’s chapter abstract, fourth sentence; reference list, Doe, Keul and Bychkov 2009
The formation of round apertures in glass by ball lightning was investigated and then reproduced by experimental modelling, and a case of elemental structural change in glass struck by the object is shown. This is the part of the record that is not testimony at all — the damaged pane is physical evidence that can be measured afterwards, and the chapter’s reference list carries a decade of window-pane studies by Nikitin, Bychkov, Shelkunov, Velichko and Turner behind it.Publisher’s chapter abstract, fifth and sixth sentences; reference list, Nikitin and colleagues 2004 through 2011 and Turner 1997
Processing of photographic and video data showing traces of natural ball lightning leads the authors to two conclusions: that ball lightning possesses an uncompensated electric charge, and that the leaking of that charge leads, in some cases, to a corona-type discharge around the object. Nikitin’s companion work in the same reference list treats that corona as a means of levitation.Publisher’s chapter abstract, seventh and eighth sentences; reference list, Nikitin, Nikitina and Velichko 2008 and 2010
The chapter puts forward and tests a model in which oxidation of finely dispersed silicon takes place inside a cover of silicon oxide, and shows that such a model can explain both the long duration and the high energy density of ball lightning. It is supported on the laboratory side by experiments on the creation of long-lived fiery spheres in an erosive capillary discharge at high pressure, in which exploding balls occur, and by computer modelling of the Gatchina discharge above a water surface, which shows a rising vortex of heated air.Publisher’s chapter abstract, ninth through eleventh sentences; reference list, Paiva and colleagues 2007 and 2010, Emelin and colleagues 2012 and 2013, Anpilov and Bychkov 2013
What to watch: the authors name their own bottleneck. Insufficient understanding of the electric phenomena of ball lightning, they write, is what prevents progress in understanding its nature — and the chapter closes by proposing that an electricity theory built on the classical hydrodynamic approach is of particular interest for that purpose. What would settle it is a natural event caught by instruments rather than by witnesses, which is what the lightning-location correlation studies are now attempting.Publisher’s chapter abstract, closing two sentences
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05239-7_4How to cite it
Vladimir L. Bychkov, Anatoly I. Nikitin (2014) Ball Lightning: A New Step in Understanding doi:10.1007/978-3-319-05239-7_4