- Stenhoff, Mark.
Ball Lightning.
New York: Kluwer Academic / Plenum Publishers, 1999.
ISBN 0-306-46150-1.
-
Reports of ball lightning—glowing spheres of light which persist for
some number of seconds, usually associated with cloud to ground
lightning strikes during thunderstorms, date back to the classical
Greeks. Since 1838, when physicist and astronomer Dominique Arago
published a survey of twenty reports of ball lightning, a long list
of scientists, many eminent, have tried their hands at crafting a
theory which might explain such an odd phenomenon yet, at the start
of the twenty-first century ball lightning remains, as Arago said
in 1854, “One of the most inexplicable problems of physics today.”
Well, actually, ball lightning only poses problems to the
physics of yesterday and today if it, you know, exists,
and the evidence that it does is rather weak, as this book
demonstrates. (Its author does come down in favour of the
existence of ball lightning, and wrote the 1976 Nature
paper which helped launched the modern study of the phenomenon.)
As of the date this book was published, not a single unambiguous
photograph, movie, or video recording of ball lightning was known to
exist, and most of the “classic” photographs illustrated in
chapter 9 are obvious fakes created by camera motion and double
exposure. It is also difficult when dealing with reports
by observers unacquainted with the relevant phenomena to sort out genuine
ball lightning (if such exists) from other well-documented and
understood effects such as corona discharges (St. Elmo's fire),
that perennial favourite of UFO debunkers:
ignis fatuus or swamp gas,
and claims of damage caused by the passage of ball
lightning or its explosive dissipation from those produced
by conventional lightning strikes. See the author's re-casting of
a lightning strike to a house which he personally investigated
into “ball lightning language” on pp. 105–106 for
an example of how such reports can originate.
Still, after sorting out the mis-identifications, hoaxes, and other
dross, a body of reports remains, some by expert observers of
atmospheric phenomena, which have a consistency not to be found, for
example, in UFO reports. A number of observations of ball lightning
within metallic aircraft fuselages are almost identical and
pose a formidable challenge to most models. The absence of
unambiguous evidence has not in any way deterred the theoretical
enterprise, and chapters 11–13 survey models based on, among
other mechanisms, heated air, self-confining plasma vortices
and spheroids, radial charge separation, chemical reactions
and combustion, microwave excitation of metastable molecules
of atmospheric gases, nuclear fusion and the production of
unstable isotopes of oxygen and nitrogen, focusing of cosmic
rays, antimatter meteorites, and microscopic black holes.
One does not get the sense of this converging upon a
consensus. Among the dubious theories, there are some odd
claims of experimental results such as the production of
self-sustaining plasma balls by placing a short burning candle
in a kitchen microwave oven (didn't work for me, anyway—if you
must try it yourself, please use common sense and be careful), and
reports of producing ball lightning sustained by fusion of
deuterium in atmospheric water vapour by short circuiting
a 200 tonne submarine accumulator battery. (Don't try
this one at home, kids!)
The book concludes with the hope that with increasing interest in
ball lightning, as evidenced by conferences such as the International
Symposia on Ball Lightning, and additional effort in collecting and
investigating reports, this centuries-old puzzle may be resolved
within this decade. I'm not so sure—the UFO precedent does not
incline one to optimism. For those motivated to pursue the matter
further, a bibliography of more than 75 pages and 2400 citations is
included.
June 2005 