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Re: Golka video: Ball Lightning in lab. WHAT?!!!!!



Original poster: Mark Fergerson <mfergerson1@xxxxxxx>

Tesla list wrote:
Original poster: William Beaty <billb@xxxxxxxxxx>

On that hot-streamer.com/mike2004 archive, Mike V's mpeg of Ball Lightning
interviews is 180 Megs and takes ~hour to download (at 30Kb per sec!)  I
clipped one interesting segment out.  Take a look at:
  1cm glowing spheres:  Golka shorts a battery bank  (30 Meg video file)
  http://www.eskimo.com/~bilb/GolkaBL.wmv

Yes!  It contains one of my hot-button topics:  WELDING SPATTER ACTS WEIRD.
If you've ever watched arc-welders, you'll note that the metal spatters
appear to be glowing spheres perhaps 1cm in diameter, but then they shrink
enormously as they cool, turning into tiny balls of metal.  I've been
wondering about this since I was eight years old watching welders at a
commercial garage.  I've seen the problem mentioned in books, and they
explain it as a visual illusion, a "radiating" retina effect where
intensely bright objects tend to look larger than reality, because the
bright light on your retina travels sideways through the retina.
Therefore a pinhead-sized metal fragment would seem to be the size of a
grape, since the fragment was incandescently bright.  Yet I was always
confused about this, since the welding spatters *don't* look that bright,
yet they still appear to be fairly large spheres.  And they seem to have a
distinct surface.  And they clearly appear to shrink as they cool.
Finally here's the same phenomenon captured on video.  It doesn't look
like an illusion now.  I bet the "illusion explanation" is wrong.

I dunno, I think they look bright enough to cause the blooming effects suggested to account for them. Look at the shadows they cast on that hanging thingy at around the 1:50 second mark.


But Golka claims that there's a salt-grain-sized metal fragment in the
center of those 5mm glowing spheres rolling across the water.
Really?  They have a solid core?  I'm suspicious!  What if Golka bases his
claim NOT on evidence (such as shadowgraphs of dark cores in the center of
those spheres.)  What if instead he ASSUMES that the metal grains were in
the spheres.  Maybe they're not.

Notice the few instances that reflections from the balls are visible on the surface of the water say from the 1:50 mark mentioned above. If they were little balls sitting in bowl-shaped depresions in the water on a cushion of water vapor, I'd expect the reflections to start a little way away from the balls. I don't see that frame-by-frame.


Also notice that most of the balls start as mundane teeny glowing sparks that fall onto the water, then "grow" into balls, emitting more and more prominent vapor plumes as they grow. That implies to me that most of the vapor plume is water, not metal, and that part of what we're seeing is the thicker cloud of vapor right next to the glowing metal bit diffusing its image regardless of the camera's (or your eyes') resolution capability.

What if the glowing sphere *is* the metal fragment?  What if our eyes
aren't fooling us, and the glowing balls really do shrink down and turn
into solid metal grains?  What if those glowing balls are something
terribly weird; matter in a quantum state half way between plasma and
metal: metal with its electron-sea pumped to stunningly high energy, not a
metal at all but an extremely dense plasma of electrons bound to positive
copper ions?

Shadowgraphing is a great idea. Spectroscopy (something as simple as looking at the balls through a prism) would help clear things up too. I'd expect a proper spectrograph to show the emission spectrum of the metal with absorption lines from water vapor. Your pseudoplasma (thought I'd coin a name for the "stuff" they're made of for you) will give what, do you think?


OTOH if they're really spherical balls of pseudoplasma, what pulls and holds them into a spherical shape in the face of the forces trying to distort them?

If those balls are as Golka says: metal vapor surrounding a tiny liquid
metal droplet ..why would metal vapor take a spherical shape with a
distinct surface, why wouldn't it just drift away like any flame would?

Because the metal bit is heavier than air; what holds it up is the continuous stream of water vapor coming off the surface immediately below it. I'd think your pseudoplasma would be lighter than air.


The explanation doesn't make sense, and I suspect that it's wrong, just as
the "retinal illusion" explanation was wrong.
I suspect that we're looking at something unexplained.

I think we're looking at something partly mis-explained.

If I'm right, then people have been staring right at Ball Lightning for
decades, while at the same time fooling ourselves with wrong explanations
which "prove" that welding-spatter is something mundane.

I'm not impressed with his reason for using water. What happens on bare dry steel? How about on dry refractory surfaces?


  Mark L. Fergerson