Wimp away... I'm with ya. We ain't got time for this now... but wait...
Memory IS unreliable and edits details (and even whole episodes) in,
whenever it serves the owner of the brain, I agree. But my point was
about needing to draw on such explanations after already positing the
notion of ball lightning as mental. As soon as we do that, the
unreliability bandage must be placed over more and more coherent
witnessings, and that leads us down the UFO rathole.
I wasn't certain what you meant about inconsistencies between lightning
strikes and ball lightning observations - I'm not suggesting some tight
relationship between them, I'm concentrating only on the ball lightning
event. If non-exotic plasma behaviors explain things adequately, then
maybe we don't need exotic-ness. But it's fun... (;-)
D
On 5/12/2010 9:12 AM, Eric Scoles wrote:
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]
<mailto:[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
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