I thought I remembered reading that there was a lot of work suggesting that some fairly non-exotic plasma behaviors were quite sufficient to explain a lot of ball lightning observations. Again, I shouldn't be spending time on this, so I'm going to wimp out and not look for links.
As far as the additional phenomena, I tend to run home to the general unreliability of memory, and especially our tendency to edit-in details that make a scene more explicable. Also, w.r.t. to your points about inconsistencies between lightning strikes and ball lightning observations, I had also thought there was a large body of sightings that weren't associated with electrical storms. On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 9:00 AM, Dana Paxson <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm a skeptic about a lot of things (although that may seem strange to some > people...), and this mental explanation of ball lightning just doesn't > hold... well... its *charge* for me. > > Descriptions I've read of the phenomenon include movements and activities > of ball lightning that incorporate detailed physical features of the > surroundings (e.g., going in or out of windows, exploding with noise, etc.) > and such things then must also be explained away. A modest flourishing of > Occam's Razor should be enough to show the shortcomings of the idea. > > I prefer a more physics-exotic idea: that ball lightning represents a form > of large-scale quantum behavior along the lines of a semi-stable > Bose-Einstein condensate at large scale, one that comprises a kind of > "monster electron" that eventually dissipates as it loses its binding energy > to its surroundings. Now THAT'S "going there" science-style! > > Dana > > > > On 5/12/2010 8:36 AM, Jason Olshefsky wrote: > >> On May 12, 2010, at 8:31 AM, Eric Scoles wrote: >> >>> The applications for Big Brother / North Korea style interrogation are >>> obvious. >>> >> >> Funny you go there ... I (of _all_ people; see also: everything I do on >> Facebook) was thinking much less nefarious purposes like the idea of angels, >> miracles, gods, seeing-is-believing, etc. >> >> --- Jason Olshefsky >> http://JayceLand.com >> http://JayceLand.com/blog >> >> > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]<r-spec%[email protected]> > . > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en.
