Ball Lightning Question.

[DIM TIM]

I was on another forum board this night, and I was reading a post from a gentleman on a DIY projecj for a portable antenna tower for a Ham Radio antenna. One of the other people that read the post , voiced a concern over the subject of overhead power lines and lightning strikes with the use of a telescopic metal mast. Another posed the question of using a mount to go into a trailer hitch reciever, and the possibility of insulation from ground by the vehicles tires.

 

The reply to his post gave a ton of info and links all to do with electricity and lightning and lightning strikes. There is where my question stems from.

 

One of the bits of information that he sent, was a news release of a man that had an encounter with BALL LIGHTNING.

It was mentioned that the Ball Lightning came thru the front door glass, passed thru the house and thru the wall of the house he was in. It went on to say that it is still unknown how it works and does what it does. This got me to thinking, and I have this question and theory of that effect and a possible way to explain it.......so here goes, and some of you that have real science backgrounds may see where I am going with this, and tell me if it could happen, or am I reaching for straws on this one.

 

 

I have a background in Industrial Electronics and Electricity. I know that glass is an insulator to a point.

I know that lightning is a physical power of heat and light, and the movement of free electrons, as a super-heated, ionized gas.

From the descriptions of the effect of Ball lightning, I see a type of energy that may be a plasma in nature.

SO....... could the Ball Lightning be passing thru the glass and the wall materials because of a electrical harmonic interacting with the weak electrical bonds of the atomic structure of the atoms of that particular material? In other words....... slipping thru the spaces between the atoms?

To get a picture in your mind, picture a beaker filled with marbles representing the glass or other structure. Take a hand full of sand ( the energy of the ball lightning ) and dump it into the beaker.

The sand grains would still touch upon the marbles, but pass on thru to the bottom.

 

OR....... could it be a phase thru type of action because of the same electrical nature of both?

In other words the same beaker full of marbles with the sand passing thru the gaps as well as the marbles themselves by a completely different set of harmonic frequencies interacting with and between each other ???

 

Told you all that I have an inquiring mind.

SO....... how about it, does anyone have an answer to this one ???

 

If it is possible, then I plan to call it DIM TIM's marble theory.:confused:

[Gilded]

Did the news say whether it did any damage? I'm not sure if I've ever heard of a ball lightning that just passed through objects without disturbing them. If I had to guess what a ball lightning is I'd go with some sort of plasma as well, some theories propose it's silicon vapor. But a substantial amount of very hot plasma isn't going to just pass through objects discreetly.

[DIM TIM]

It did not say, and this is what brought the question to my mind in the first place. The way the report was written, led me to think that there was none at all.The person that this happened to said it went right past him, or perhaps even thru him, and passed thru the wall behind him.

This is what made me think that the thing was harmonic in nature, and sort of phased thru objects or at least between the molecules.

[Norman Albers]

In a difficult encounter on a faraway forum in a distant galaxy, ruled by the Evil King X, when my inhomogeneous electron model with circular currents was dismissed as garbage, I re-entered in under Electrodynamics, "Possible Solution for Ball Lightning". I was partly serious, though the vacuum fluctuation field is not the same as ionized atoms. I do claim that if the field structure described is established in an ionizable medium, it will have self-sustaining dynamics.

Edited December 14, 2008 by Norman Albers

[north]

It did not say, and this is what brought the question to my mind in the first place. The way the report was written, led me to think that there was none at all.The person that this happened to said it went right past him, or perhaps even thru him, and passed thru the wall behind him.

This is what made me think that the thing was harmonic in nature, and sort of phased thru objects or at least between the molecules.

 

it is important to get ALL the details before you theroize though

 

is it not ?