His next novel, Ball Lightning, is being translated into English, and follows a boy named Chen who watched his parents die in a blast of ball lightning.
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Ball Lightning does't quite reach the lofty heights that The Three-Body Problem.
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Theories as to what the lights are include ball lightning and natural gases.
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More research on skyrmions could prove useful for other reasons than just modeling ball lightning, Hansen said.
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More broadly, Ball Lightning showcases the inherent dangers in developing advanced weapons with experimental science and technology.
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As a story, Ball Lightning is a bit more of a grounded read than The Three-Body Problem.
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Instead, Liu focuses less on exploring his characters' personal issues and more on their obsession with ball lightning.
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"The biggest moment was when we realized we got the same electromagnetic fields as predicted for ball lightning," said Möttönen.
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Illustration: Heikka Valja (Aalto University)There's an eerie and incredibly rare phenomenon witnessed by few that has long puzzled scientists: ball lightning.
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The Wandering Earth is based on a story by Cixin Liu, the author best known for The Three-Body Problem, and, more recently, Ball Lightning.
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Haunted by the memory of his dead parents, he obsesses over the strange incident, going to university to learn everything he can about ball lightning.
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The movie is based on a story by Chinese author Cixin Liu — who's best known for his Three-Body Problem trilogy and last year's Ball Lightning.
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The book follows a young man named Chen who witnesses the death of his parents in a freak accident — they're incinerated by a ball lightning strike.
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Along the way, he meets an obsessive army weapons engineer named Lin Yun, who wants to harness the power of ball lightning into a new weapon.
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And most UFOs do often turn out to have banal explanations: Venus shifting colors through the thick atmosphere, planes coming your direction head-on, satellite, ball lightning, military projects.
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Sequels to that novel, The Dark Forest and Death's End, also received widespread acclaim, and now, Liu has a new book out in English: Ball Lightning, translated by Joel Martinsen.
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There are no aliens in this story, which follows the life of a young man named Chen who watches as both of his parents are incinerated by a phenomenon known as ball lightning.
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The ball lightning weapons that Lin and Chen are responsible for creating could aid China against its adversaries (presumably the United States, but frustratingly, Liu never fleshes out the specific geopolitics of the looming war).
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Another of his novels is now being translated into English: Ball Lightning, a military science fiction story about a young man who is looking to solve the mystery behind his parents' deaths, and uncovers an experimental weapons program.
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He and his fellow scientists realize that they have stumbled upon a new, fundamental nature of reality: ball lightning doesn't appear randomly, but is composed of macro-elements: massive, unseen electrons that appears when the conditions line up perfectly.
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But now, using some of the most mind-bending physics around, physicists think that they've recreated ball lightning, in miniature, in the lab, while at the same time observing a different physical phenomenon in its own right for the first time.
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Ball Lightning by Cixin Liu and translated by Joel Martinsen Cixin Liu, one of China's premiere science fiction authors, came to international attention with his Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy (The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death's End).
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Retrieved on July 2, 2007. Often accompanying the glow is a distinct hissing or buzzing sound. It is sometimes confused with ball lightning.
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Even seventy hours of labor, however, could not have produced a clearer picture...the evidence leads to an overwhelming probability: the fiery unknown at Levelland was ball lightning." Menzel argued that "in Levelland on the night of November 2 conditions were ideal for the formation of ball lightning. For several days the area had been experiencing freak weather, and on the night in question had been visited by rain, thunderstorms and lightning." Menzel admitted that "since ball lightning is short-lived and cannot be preserved as tangible evidence, its appearance on the night of November 2 can never be absolutely proved.
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He investigated ball lightning with Julio Rubinstein and James R. Powell. They concluded that ball lightning is most likely a wandering St. Elmo's fire, a low-temperature soliton in the atmospheric electric current flow. He also put forward an in- depth interpretation of the engraving Melencolia I of Albrecht Dürer. He died in Atlanta on January 24, 2016, aged 86.
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There are also other hypotheses on their truth identities such as the natural combustion of petroleum or ball lightning, but there are many that still go unexplained.
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There is no accepted explanation for the Christchurch Dragon. However, the references to an abnormally violent rainstorm accompanied by lightning bears a resemblance to the Great Thunderstorm on Dartmoor in 1638. This has led to the speculation, supported by Christopher Chatfield, Deputy Director of the Ball Lightning Research Division of TORRO (Tornado & Storm Research Organisation), that the canons of Laon may have witnessed a rare example of prolonged ball lightning.
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Ball Lightning () is a 1979 Czechoslovak comedy film. The screenplay was written by Zdeněk Svěrák, Ladislav Smoljak and Zdeněk Podskalský and the film was directed by Smoljak and Podskalský.
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The novel follows the experiences of a first-person protagonist, Chen, whose family was killed by a ball lightning while he was in high school. Both traumatized and inspired by that experience, he makes the investigation of ball lightning his life's work, first getting his PhD in the subject, then exploring the phenomena through both applied and theoretical research. During the research, a military technology researcher Lin Yuan who wants to turn his science into a weapon and brings him in to a weapons development research team. With the help of a theoretical physicist, Ding Yi, they recognize that ball lightning is not formed by lightning conditions, but rather when lightning encounters "macro-electrons" hypercharging the electrons until they express their energy.
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A collection of unrelated subjects and a summing-up – including the sailing stones of Death Valley, the alma, entombed toads, ball lightning in which physicist James Tuck appears, and a summing-up.
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After his retirement Tuck became a prominent public supporter of research into thermonuclear fusion for power generation. He also became interested in the phenomenon of ball lightning, probably because of the connection between plasmas and their role in fusion power schemes, and in 1980 he appeared in the Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World episode 'Clarke's Cabinet of Curiosities' where he described his experiments at Los Alamos, carried out during lunch breaks, to create ball lightning using a large storage battery of the type then used in submarines.
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A depiction of atmospheric electricity in a Martian dust storm, which has been suggested as a possible explanation for enigmatic chemistry results from Mars (see also Viking lander biological experiments) St. Elmo's Fire is an electrical phenomenon in which luminous plasma is created by a coronal discharge originating from a grounded object. Ball lightning is often erroneously identified as St. Elmo's Fire, whereas they are separate and distinct phenomena.Barry, J.D. (1980a) Ball Lightning and Bead Lightning: Extreme Forms of Atmospheric Electricity. 8–9. New York and London: Plenum Press.
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Ball Lightning () is a hard science fiction novel by Chinese author Liu Cixin. The original Chinese version was published in 2004. In 2018 the English version, translated by Joel Martinsen, was published in the US by Tor Books.
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A stream of water pinching into droplets has been suggested as an analogy to the electromagnetic pinch. The gravity accelerates free-falling water which causes the water column to constrict. Then surface tension breaks the narrowing water column into droplets (not shown here) (see Plateau-Rayleigh instability), which is analogous to the magnetic field which has been suggested as the cause of pinching in bead lightning."The PLASMAK Configuration and Ball Lightning" (PDF ) presented at the International Symposium on Ball Lightning; July 1988 The morphology (shape) is similar to the so-called sausage instability in plasma.
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The Flakpanzer IV Kugelblitz ("Ball Lightning") was a German self-propelled anti-aircraft gun developed during World War II. By the end of the war, only a pilot production of five units had been completed. Unlike earlier self- propelled anti-aircraft guns, it had a fully enclosed, rotating turret.
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43–44 A 1901 depiction of ball lightning David Turner, a retired physical chemist, suggested that ball lightning could cause inanimate objects to move erratically. Joe Nickell of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry wrote that there was no credible scientific evidence that any location was inhabited by spirits of the dead. Limitations of human perception and ordinary physical explanations can account for ghost sightings; for example, air pressure changes in a home causing doors to slam, humidity changes causing boards to creak, condensation in electrical connections causing intermittent behavior, or lights from a passing car reflected through a window at night. Pareidolia, an innate tendency to recognize patterns in random perceptions, is what some skeptics believe causes people to believe that they have 'seen ghosts'.
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Some ghost lights such as St. Elmo's fire or the shiranui have been explained as optical phenomena of light emitted through electrical activity. Other types may be due to combustion of flammable gases, ball lightning, meteors, torches and other human-made fires, the misperception of human objects, and pranks. Almost all such fires have received such naturalistic explanations.
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The mill was dismantled c.1911. It was subsequently converted to residential use for the keeper of a ferry. In 1968, the mill was struck by ball lightning. It was sold the following year and repaired and made habitable again, using parts from the wind saw mill De Visser, Leeuwarden, Friesland that had burnt down on 16 January 1964.
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Two men and a woman stop at a small house in the woods. Inside, they experience numerous instances of paranormal activity, including disappearing furniture; a stereotypical ghost; movement of cutlery and food on their own; ball lightning; unexplained tilting of the entire home; and a grotesque being with claw-like fingers that attempts to eat the trio.
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The military, fearing the consequences of such technology, shut down the research, but Lin disobeys orders and starts the planned macro- fusion trial, at the cost of her own life. The reaction destroyed microprocessors across a swathe of China, and as the world recognizes the power of any future macro-fusion events to wipe out advanced weaponry across a theater of war, an armistice is signed. At the end of the novel, an American ball lightning researcher visits Chen and they discuss his latest research. The Americans had found that in several trials, ball lightning behaved as though an observer was present, despite the experiment being held deep in a mineshaft with no human observers; thus foreshadowing the Trisolarans' silent watch on humanity in Liu's Three-Body Problem novel.
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Caprice recovers enough to talk to Dryden. Benjamin heads for Haas' base, constructing an electricity gun ("It's a ball lightning gun.") as he goes. Caprice convinces Dryden to let her out; Haas sends his robot army, including a particularly large robot named Pindar, to the city to mop up Rocco's mob and make a convincing (if perhaps premature) show of strength.
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Mikhail Il'ich Zelikin (; born 11 February 1936) is a Russian mathematician, who works on differential equations (in particular, Riccati equations), optimal control theory, differential games (for instance, Princess and monster game), the theory of fields of extremals for multiple integrals, the geometry of Grassmannians. He proposed an explanation of ball lightning based on the hypothesis of plasma superconductivity.M.I. Zelikin. Superconductivity of plasma and fireballs.
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Hinton Daubney is a small hamlet in Hampshire, England, located between Catherington and Hambledon. It is the site of one of the earliest recorded sightings of ball lightning. Hinton Daubney played a role in the escape of Charles II from England after the battle of Worcester. It is one of the places where he and Lord Wilmot found loyal support in the person of Lawrence Hyde.
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Other theories put forward have suggested that Adamski was killed by KGB, or that he had been struck by ball lightning, gotten dazed and confused and wandered off to the coal pile and died. Adamski's wife, Lottie, initially suspected that her husband had been kidnapped. According to sceptics, “this case is just another example of a story that sounds good at first, but that dissolves under direct scrutiny.
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With the electric rifle, Tom and friends bring down elephants, rhinoceroses, and buffalo, and save their lives several times in pitched battle with the red pygmies. It also can discharge a globe of light that was described as being able to maintain itself, like ball lightning, making hunting at night much safer in the dark of Africa. In appearance, the rifle looked very much like contemporary conventional rifles.
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The tornado eventually dissipated near Jacobs Mountain. Remarkable electrical phenomenon was reported as the tornado passed through Huntsville, with reports of luminous clouds, ball lightning, and multi-colored flashes and glowing areas in the sky as the storm moved through the city. These aforementioned flashes were more than likely Power Flashes, which are flashes of light caused by arcing electrical discharges from damaged electrical equipment, most often severed power lines.
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On April 2, 1978, there was a loud explosion on Bell Island which caused damage to some houses and the electrical house wiring in the surrounding area. Two cup-shaped holes about two feet deep and three feet wide marked the major impact. A number of TV sets in Lance Cove, the surrounding community, exploded at the time of the blast. It was initially thought to be caused by ball lightning.
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A contemporary woodcut of the storm The Great Thunderstorm of Widecombe-in- the-Moor in Dartmoor, Kingdom of England, took place on Sunday, 21 October 1638, when the church of St Pancras was apparently struck by ball lightning during a severe thunderstorm. An afternoon service was taking place at the time, and the building was packed with approximately 300 worshippers. Four of them were killed, around 60 injured, and the building severely damaged.
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After the Christianization of Kievan Rus, this place became a monastery, which, quite remarkably, continued to bear the name of Perun. Gromoviti znaci or thunder marks are considered by some scholars as "ancient symbols of Perun", which are often engraved upon roof beams or over entries of village houses, to protect them from lightning bolts. Their circular shape symbolises ball lightning. Identical symbols were discovered on Slavic pottery of 4th century Chernyakhov culture.
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In 1970 Robert K. Golka built a replica of Tesla's huge Colorado Springs magnifying transmitter in a shed at Wendover Air Force Base, Utah, using data he found in Tesla's lab notes archived at the Nikola Tesla Museum in Beograd, Serbia. This was one of the first experiments with the magnifier circuit since Tesla's time. The coil generated 12 million volts. Golka used it to try to duplicate Tesla's reported synthesis of ball lightning.
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Lewi Tonks (1897–1971) was an American quantum physicist noted for his discovery (with Marvin D. Girardeau) of the Tonks-Girardeau gas. Tonks was employed by General Electric for most of his working life, researching microwaves and ferromagnetism. He worked under Irving Langmuir on plasma physics, with a special interest in ball lightning, nuclear fusion, tungsten filament light bulbs, and lasers. Tonks advocated a logarithmic pressure scale for vacuum technology to replace the torr.
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Another Shinto monkey myth concerns the God of Lightning Raijin who is accompanied by shape- shifting raijū (雷獣,"thunder beast") ball lightning that sometimes appeared as a monkey. Sarugami (猿神, lit. "monkey god") was part of the Sannō Shintō sect, which was based upon the cult of the Mountain God Sannō (山王, "mountain king") and Tendai Buddhism. Sarugami was Sannō's messenger, and served as an intermediary between deities and humans.
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Electron Power Systems, Inc. of Acton, Massachusetts, United States, claims to have developed a technology for maintaining small stable plasma toroids called electron spiral toroids (ESTs) which remain stable in Earth's atmosphere without the use of any special magnetic fields. They claim to have created these toroids in the laboratory, and to have developed a mathematical model for them that is similar to some explanations for ball lightning. An EST may be a special case of a spheromak.
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It was enlarged over the following two centuries, partly on the proceeds of the local tin-mining trade. Inside, the ceiling is decorated with a large number of decorative roof bosses, including the tinner's emblem of a circle of three hares (known locally as the Tinners' Rabbits). The church was badly damaged in the Great Thunderstorm of 1638, apparently struck by ball lightning. An afternoon service was taking place at the time, and the building was packed with approximately 300 worshippers.
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Some debunkers suggested that the affair was a hoax. Harvard astronomer Donald Menzel first suggested that Zamora had been the victim of a complex prank engineered by high school students who "planned the whole business to 'get' Zamora." (Hynek suggested this to some Socorro citizens, who discounted the idea.) Years later, Menzel argued that Zamora had misidentified a dust devil. Journalist and prominent UFO skeptic Philip J. Klass first suggested that the Zamora sighting was due to misidentified ball lightning.
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TORRO comprises nearly 400 members in the United Kingdom and others from around the world, from amateurs to professional meteorologists, and almost 30 staff. TORRO maintains a large storm spotter network throughout the British Isles and collects and records reports of severe weather. TORRO carries out research on many aspects of severe weather including ball lightning, blizzards & heavy snowfall, coastal impacts, hailstorms, lightning impacts, tornadoes, thunderstorms, weather disasters, and weather & health. Tornadoes in the UK are classified using the T-scale.
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Bauer is the oldest of five children. She was born on an Air Force Base where her father was stationed in Greenville, South Carolina. According to family lore, she was struck by ball lightning while sleeping in her bassinet during a thunderstorm. She spent the first five years of her life in Kearney, New Jersey in the same three-family house as her paternal grandparents, and her summers at the Bauer family property on Bodin Lake in Upstate New York.
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The three main kinds of lightning are distinguished by where they occur: either inside a single thundercloud, between two different clouds, or between a cloud and the ground. Many other observational variants are recognized, including "heat lightning", which can be seen from a great distance but not heard; dry lightning, which can cause forest fires; and ball lightning, which is rarely observed scientifically. Humans have deified lightning for millennia. Idiomatic expressions derived from lightning, such as the English expression "bolt from the blue", are common across languages.
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The boundary between the two formed a squall line stretching from Devon, along the England–Wales border and up across Northern England to the River Tees. Thick clouds, darkened by the Sahara dust, rose to , plunging areas along the squall line into total darkness. In some areas, the lightning continued for 24 hours, and ball lightning was seen at RAF Chivenor in Devon. The dust particles served as seeds for nucleation, causing water to rapidly precipitate out and form especially large raindrops and hailstones.
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Jennison was appointed to the University of Kent at Canterbury in 1965 and was the first Professor of Physical Electronics at the University. Within a year he established the Electronics Laboratory (later Department of Electronics and now School of Engineering and Digital Arts) at the University. Prior to his appointment at Kent he was Senior Lecturer in Radio Astronomy at Jodrell Bank Observatory and Senior Lecturer in Physics, Manchester University. His research interests extended to relativity, studying paths of light in rotating systems, and also to studying ball lightning and water divining.
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The formations under the command of V SS Mountain Corps varied during Phlep's command. In July 1944, it consisted of the 118th Jäger Division and 369th (Croatian) Infantry Division in addition to the 7th SS and 13th SS divisions. Throughout Phlep's command, the corps was under the overall control of 2nd Panzer Army and conducted anti-Partisan operations throughout the NDH and Montenegro. These operations included Operations Kugelblitz (ball lightning) and Schneesturm (blizzard), which were part of a major offensive in eastern Bosnia in December 1943, but they were only a limited success.
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Some thought the object might be ball lightning, others were convinced they could see a face in the image. One woman who claimed to be a spiritual reader said she saw five separate spirits in the video and another person advised the journalist to consult a "reputable channeler". The New Mexican website logged thousands of hits for the video. The video was later uploaded to YouTube and was viewed more than 50,000 times within a couple of days, reaching the top 15 videos on the site at that time.
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Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan also notes the phenomenon affecting Winston Niles Rumfoord's dog, Kazak, the Hound of Space, in conjunction with solar disturbances of the chrono-synclastic infundibulum. In "On The Banks of Plum Creek" by Laura Ingalls Wilder St. Elmo's fire is seen by the girls and Ma during one of the blizzards. It was described as coming down the stove pipe and rolling across the floor following Ma's knitting needles; it didn't burn the floor (pages 309-310). The phenomenon as described, however, is more similar to ball lightning.
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They learn how to capture these macro-electrons, and turn them into the a weapon which can destroy targeted types of matter; wood, stone, or even microprocessors. After building a weapon and specialized military unit to use the device, they successfully deploy the weapon against anti-technology eco-terrorists who try to blow up a nuclear plant, but kill a group of schoolchildren that had been held hostage. Disillusioned, Chen leaves the military research group. Using a technology they developed in the ball lightning research, Chen develops a strategy for tracking tornado formation.
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In 1752, Franklin proposed an experiment with conductive rods to attract lightning to a leyden jar, an early form of capacitor. Such an experiment was carried out in May 1752 at Marly-la-Ville in northern France by Thomas-François Dalibard. An attempt to replicate the experiment killed Georg Wilhelm Richmann in Saint Petersburg in August 1753; he was thought to be the victim of ball lightning. Franklin himself is said to have conducted the experiment in June 1752, supposedly on the top of the spire on Christ Church in Philadelphia.
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This was followed by another skeptical review of work by the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP). These articles garnered Klass tremendous attention within the UFO community, and, as Howard Blum put it, "... as if overnight, he had been christened by both friends and foes 'the country's leading UFO debunker'". Klass initially applied his ball lightning theory cautiously and selectively in a series of magazine articles. He and physicist James E. McDonald exchanged cordial letters on the subject, and McDonald agreed that some UFOs might be a type of ball lighting.
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In 1971, fragments of antimatter comets or meteoroids were hypothesized, by David E. T. F. Ashby of Culham Laboratory and Colin Whitehead of the U.K. Atomic Energy Research Establishment, as a possible cause for ball lightning . They monitored the sky with gamma-ray detection apparatus, and reported unusually high numbers at 511 keV (kilo-electron volts) which is the characteristic gamma ray frequency of a collision between an electron and a positron. There were natural explanations for such readings. In particular positrons can be produced indirectly by the action of a thunderstorm, as it creates the unstable isotopes nitrogen-13 and oxygen-15.
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The Professor ran home with his engraver to capture the event for posterity. While the experiment was underway, a supposed ball lightning appeared and collided with Richmann's head leaving him dead with a red spot on his forehead, his shoes blown open, and parts of his clothes singed. An explosion followed "like that of a small Cannon" that knocked the engraver out, split the room's door frame, and tore the door off its hinges.On 6 August 1753, the Swedish scientist Georg Wilhelm Richmann was electrocuted in St. Petersburg while trying to quantify the response of an insulated rod to a nearby storm.
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That evening, a lightning storm strikes the house and sends ball lightning down the chimney and onto the mummy—which evaporates. Worried, Tarragon states that this reflects the culmination of Capac's prophecy, which declares that punishment will descend upon those who desecrate his tomb. Spending the stormy night at Tarragon's house, Tintin, Haddock, and Calculus are each awoken by a dream involving Capac's mummy throwing a crystal ball to the floor. They find Tarragon comatose in his bed, with the accompanying crystal shards nearby; the attacker had bypassed the guards by climbing in via the chimney.
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Its body is composed of lightning and with the form of a white and blue wolf or dog (or even a wolf or dog wrapped in lightning) being the most common, although it can be represented with other forms such as tanuki, fox, weasel, tiger, cat, bear, porcupine, boar or dragon. It may also fly about as a ball of lightning (in fact, the creature may be an attempt to explain the phenomenon of lightning, such as ball lightning). Its cry sounds like thunder. Raiju is the companion of the Raijin, the Shinto god of lightning.
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William Noah, a silversmith convicted in London of stealing 2,000 pounds of lead, while en route to Sydney, New South Wales on the convict transport ship , recorded two such observations in his detailed daily journal. The first was in the Southern Ocean midway between Cape Town and Sydney and the second was in the Tasman Sea, a day out of Port Jackson: While the exact nature of these weather phenomena cannot be certain, they appear to be mostly about two observations of St. Elmo's fire with perhaps some ball lightning and even a direct lightning strike to the ship thrown into the mix.
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Operation Kugelblitz ("ball lightning") was a major anti-Partisan offensive orchestrated by German forces in December 1943 during World War II in Yugoslavia. The Germans attacked Josip Broz Tito's Partisan forces in the eastern parts of the Independent State of Croatia in an attempt to encircle and destroy them, thereby preventing the Partisans from entering the Territory of the Military Commander in Serbia. Operation Kugelblitz was followed up immediately by Operation Schneesturm (Blizzard) which sought to capitalise on the initial success of Operation Kugelblitz. Both operations are associated with the Sixth Enemy Offensive () in Yugoslav historiography.
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The Levelland UFO case occurred on November 2–3, 1957, in and around the small town of Levelland, Texas. Levelland, which in 1957 had a population of about 10,000, is located west of Lubbock on the flat prairie of the Texas South Plains. The case is considered by ufologists to be one of the most impressive in UFO history, mainly because of the large number of witnesses involved over a relatively short period of time. However, both the US Air Force and UFO skeptics have described the incident as being caused by either ball lightning or a severe electrical storm.
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Although others cite the single sourced nature of the claims, the complete lack of evidence supporting them, and the implausible capabilities of the supposed device as nonsense. The Nazi UFO Mythos The Nazi UFO Mythos: An Investigation by Kevin McClure Any type of electrical discharge from the wings of airplanes (see St. Elmo's Fire) has been suggested as an explanation, since it has been known to appear at the wingtips of aircraft. It has also been pointed out that some of the descriptions of foo fighters closely resemble those of ball lightning. During April 1945, the U.S. Navy began to experiment on visual illusions as experienced by nighttime aviators.
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The Levelland sightings received national publicity, and were soon investigated by Project Blue Book. Started in 1947 as Project Sign, Project Blue Book was the official US Air Force research group assigned to investigate UFO reports. An Air Force sergeant was sent to Levelland, and spent seven hours in the city investigating the incident. After interviewing three of the eyewitnesses – Saucedo, Wheeler, and Wright – and after learning that thunderstorms were present in the area earlier in the day, the Air Force investigator concluded that a severe electrical storm – most probably ball lightning or St. Elmo's fire – was the major cause for the sightings and reported auto failures.
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For many purposes a ring vortex may be approximated as having a vortex-core of small cross-section. However a simple theoretical solution, called Hill's spherical vortex after the English mathematician Micaiah John Muller Hill (1856–1929), is known in which the vorticity is distributed within a sphere (the internal symmetry of the flow is however still annular). Such a structure or an electromagnetic equivalent has been suggested as an explanation for the internal structure of ball lightning. For example, Shafranov used a magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) analogy to Hill's stationary fluid mechanical vortex to consider the equilibrium conditions of axially symmetric MHD configurations, reducing the problem to the theory of stationary flow of an incompressible fluid.
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It has been suggested that crop circles may be the result of extraordinary meteorological phenomena ranging from freak tornadoes to ball lightning, but there is no evidence of any crop circle being created by any of these causes. In 1880, an amateur scientist, John Rand Capron, wrote a letter to the editor of journal Nature about some circles in crops and blamed them on a recent storm, saying their shape was "suggestive of some cyclonic wind action". In 1980, Terence Meaden, a meteorologist and physicist, proposed that the circles were caused by whirlwinds whose course was affected by southern England hills. As circles became more complex, Terence had to create increasingly complex theories, blaming an electromagneto-hydrodynamic "plasma vortex".
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For example, Max Planck interpolated between the Wien and Jeans radiation laws and used Occam's razor logic to formulate the quantum hypothesis, even resisting that hypothesis as it became more obvious that it was correct. Appeals to simplicity were used to argue against the phenomena of meteorites, ball lightning, continental drift, and reverse transcriptase. One can argue for atomic building blocks for matter, because it provides a simpler explanation for the observed reversibility of both mixing and chemical reactions as simple separation and rearrangements of atomic building blocks. At the time, however, the atomic theory was considered more complex because it implied the existence of invisible particles that had not been directly detected.
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American scientists combine that technology with missiles to suppress tornado formation in the American Midwest. When war breaks out between the U.S. and China, the U.S. uses a similar application of Chen's technology to form tornadoes as a weapon to destroy naval vessels. Living daily life in wartime China, Chen is surprised to one day find that all the microprocessors in the city have been incinerated. Ding Yi finds Chen and recounts that he and Lin's research group had progressed beyond macro-electrons to find macro-nuclei as well, bringing about the possibility of creating "macro-fusion," which would combine the power of conventional nuclear weapons with the matter-selectivity of ball lightning.
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The report noted: "No artefacts of unknown or unexplained origin have been reported or handed to the UK authorities, despite thousands of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena reports. There are no SIGINT, ELINT or radiation measurements and little useful video or still IMINT." It concluded: "There is no evidence that any UAP, seen in the UKADR [UK Air Defence Region], are incursions by air-objects of any intelligent (extraterrestrial or foreign) origin, or that they represent any hostile intent." A little-discussed conclusion of the report was that novel meteorological plasma phenomenon akin to ball lightning are responsible for "the majority, if not all" of otherwise inexplicable sightings, especially reports of black triangle UFOs.
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The church of St Pancras is known as the "Cathedral of the Moors" in recognition of its 120-foot tower and relatively large capacity for such a small village. Originally built in the fourteenth century, in the Perpendicular style (late Gothic), using locally quarried granite, it was enlarged over the following two centuries, partly on the proceeds of the local tin mining trade. Inside, the ceiling is decorated with a large number of decorative roof bosses, including the tinner’s emblem of a circle of three hares (known locally as the Tinners' Rabbits). St Pancras Church, Widecombe- in-the-Moor It was badly damaged in the Great Thunderstorm of 1638, apparently struck by ball lightning during an afternoon service.
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She's saved by the shopkeeper who provides the presents, and he advises her that the answer to the exam is not something that can be taught or told, it's something unique to her that she needs to find herself. As they continue their journey, they're attacked by a collection of "mukku", sprites similar to ball lightning. They're saved by Pedro and the other Santas, who came to their aid, only for the remaining ones to join together into a powerful spirit that grabs Noel and tries to consume her. Bell continues to attack the spirit and barely manages to save her, with help from the bell he'd given her that turns out to be a powerful talisman meant to remain sealed.
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He attended as Secretary not long before his death. He contributed to the Transactions of the Society: 'Some Observations on the Climate and Mortality of London in 1857, deduced from the Records of the Medical Officers of Health and the Returns of the Registrar-General'; (2) 'On the Meteorology and Mortality of 1858; (3) On the Medical Meteorology of the Metropolis during the Years 1859, 1860, and 1861'; (4) 'Presidential Addresses in 1872–73'; (5) 'On the Winter Climate of Some English Sea-side Health Resorts'; (6) 'On Some Relations of Meteorological Phenomena to Health'; (7) 'Ball Lightning Seen during a Thunderstorm on 11 July 1874'. The appreciation expressed by Sir Edward Sieveking of his other writings applies with equal force to these.
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He cooperated with Ladislav Smoljak (Ball Lightning, Waiter, Scarper!, Jára Cimrman Lying, Sleeping) Karel Kachyňa (Love Between the Raindrops, Forbidden Dreams), Jiří Menzel (Cutting It Short, The Snowdrop Festival, My Sweet Little Village), Věra Chytilová (Calamity, Wolf's Hole) or Václav Havel (Leaving). Jiří Brožek was awarded nine Czech Lions for films Krvavý román (1993), Sekal Has to Die (1998), Anděl Exit (2000), Boredom in Brno (2003), The City of the Sun (2005), Pleasant Moments (2006), ...a bude hůř (2007), Leaving (2011) and Filthy (2017), twice he gained Slovak film award Slnko v sieti for The City of the Sun (2006) and Gypsy (2012). He is a member of Czech Film and Television Academy (ČFTA) and honourable member of Slovak Film and Television Academy (SFTA).
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Natural plasmoid produced in the near-Earth magnetotail by the magnetic reconnection. A plasmoid is a coherent structure of plasma and magnetic fields. Plasmoids have been proposed to explain natural phenomena such as ball lightning, magnetic bubbles in the magnetosphere,Hones, E. W., Jr., "The magnetotail - Its generation and dissipation", (1976) Physics of solar planetary environments; Proceedings of the International Symposium on Solar- Terrestrial Physics, Boulder, Colo., June 7–18, 1976. Volume 2. and objects in cometary tails,Roosen, R. G.; Brandt, J. C., "Possible Detection of Colliding Plasmoids in the Tail of Comet Kohoutek" (1976), Study of Comets, Proceedings of IAU Colloq. 25, held in Greenbelt, MD, 28 October - 1 November 1974. Edited by B. D. Donn, M. Mumma, W. Jackson, M. A'Hearn, and R. Harrington. National Aeronautics and Space Administration SP 393, 1976.
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Rainbow Line's trainer Hidekazu Asami Two weeks after his last start of 2015, Rainbow Line began his second campaign in the Shinzan Kinen at Kyoto and finished sixth of the eighteen runners behind Logi Cry. On 27 February at Hanshin the colt contested the Grade 3 Arlington Cup over 1600 metres on firm ground and started the 5.8/1 fourth choice in the betting behind Urban Kid, Ball Lightning (Keio Hai Nisai Stakes) and Hiruno Magellan. Ridden by Mirco Demuro he raced towards the rear of the field before moving up on the wide outside on the final turn and staying on strongly in the straight. In a "blanket finish" which saw the first five finishers separated by less than a half a length he prevailed by a nose from Dantsu Prius.
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Clarke looks at ball lightning (including one sighting by Roger Jennison in the cabin of an aircraft), the Loch Ness Monster, Remy Van Lierde's encounter with a gigantic snake, a sighting of a sea serpent off the coast of England, the stone spheres of Costa Rica, the Baghdad Battery, the vitrified forts of Scotland, Stonehenge, and the Cerne Abbas Giant. The ruined ancient palace of Sigiriya in Sri Lanka, which Clarke mentions at the beginning of the episode, could also be included in this category. #Mysteries of the Third Kind — phenomena for which we have no rational explanation. Clarke mentions psychic phenomena as something that would be included in this category, and the extremely strange phenomena of raining animals and seeds and nuts "raining" from the sky might also be included.
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Klass's involvement in the UFO field can be traced to his reading of journalist John G. Fuller's Incident at Exeter (1966), about a series of UFO sightings in and around Exeter, New Hampshire. Noting that many of the Exeter UFO incidents took place close to high-power electric lines, Klass suspected that the UFO reports were best explained as a previously unknown type of plasma or ball lightning that might have been generated from the power lines or their transformers. A plasma, thought Klass, could be consistent with many UFO reports of bright lights moving erratically; a highly charged plasma might further explain the reported effects of UFOs on the electrical systems of airplanes and automobiles. Klass wrote up his theory in a review of Fuller's book which was published in Aviation Week.
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Retrieved January 4, 2009"less well-known is the fact that Charles Fort coined the word in 1931" in Rickard, B. and Michell, J. Unexplained Phenomena: a Rough Guide special (Rough Guides, 2000 (), p. 3) falls of frogs, fishes, and inorganic materials, spontaneous human combustion, ball lightning (a term explicitly used by Fort), poltergeist events, unaccountable noises and explosions, levitation, unidentified flying objects, unexplained disappearances, giant wheels of light in the oceans, and animals found outside their normal ranges (see phantom cat). He offered many reports of out-of-place artifacts (OOPArts), strange items found in unlikely locations. He was also perhaps the first person to explain strange human appearances and disappearances by the hypothesis of alien abduction and was an early proponent of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, specifically suggesting that strange lights or objects sighted in the skies might be alien spacecraft.
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Pages vi and vii of the 38th edition including the first page of the contents Page viii and 1 of the 38th edition including the second page of the contents The object of The Guide to Science was to present answers to over 2000 questions about common phenomena. There are questions dealing with the man-made objects such as candles, stoves and chimneys as well as answers seeking to explain natural phenomena such as thunder and lightning (including a mention of ball lightning), clouds, dew and rainbows. Brewer intended that his book should be intelligible to a child, since children might often ask the questions he was seeking to answer, but without being so foolish as to offend the scientific. The book is divided into two or three parts, depending upon the edition, each part having several chapters.
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An example from a Serbian folk song from Montenegro with strong mythical elements relates: …Те извади три јабуке златне И баци их небу у висине... …Три муње од неба пукоше Једна гађа два дјевера млада, Друга гађа пашу на дорину, Трећа гађа свата шест стотина, Не утече ока за свједока, Ни да каже, како погибоше. "…He grabbed three golden apples And threw them high into the sky... …Three lightning bolts burst from the sky, The first struck at two young grooms, The second struck pasha on brown horse, The third struck six hundred wedding guests, Not an eyewitness left Not even to say how they died." It is conjectured that the mythical golden apples of Perun were symbols of a rare but notorious form of atmospheric discharge, ball lightning. The same is probably true for the thunder marks of East Slavic folklore, of which two examples are shown above.
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In theoretical physics, a Schwarzschild kugelblitz (German: "ball lightning") is a concentration of heat, light or radiation so intense that its energy forms an event horizon and becomes self-trapped: according to general relativity and the equivalence of mass and energy, if enough radiation is aimed into a region, the concentration of energy can warp spacetime enough for the region to become a black hole, although this would be a black hole whose original mass-energy had been in the form of radiant energy rather than matter. In simpler terms, a kugelblitz is a black hole formed from radiation as opposed to matter. Such a black hole would nonetheless have properties identical to one of equivalent mass and angular momentum formed in a more conventional way, in accordance with the no-hair theorem. The best-known reference to the kugelblitz idea in English is probably John Archibald Wheeler's 1955 paper "Geons", which explored the idea of creating particles (or toy models of particles) from spacetime curvature, called geons.
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Static's powers center around electromagnetism, making him part of the Earth's electromagnetic field as well as capable of generating and storing his own electromagnetic energy. He can choose to keep the electromagnetic energy that he currently holds in his body by controlling the current and voltage for whenever he wants to use it. Static's body can generate raw electromagnetic energy, which he can control at will for various purposes. Such uses commonly include magnetizing objects, electrocuting opponents, levitating objects (such as manhole-covers or his self-built metal saucer for use in flight) and people, restraining or adhering people/objects to various surfaces in the form of "static cling", generating "taser punches and kicks" with effects similar to a stun gun and at times enough power to send opponents flying during close combat (once even punching a huge bang-baby made of molten magma through a brick wall), various electromagnetic displays as well as electromagnetic nets or cages, blinding flashes, generating thrown ball lightning, producing electromagnetic pulses, and generating electromagnetic force fields to shield himself from attacks, even stopping bullets in mid-air.
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