kinda like a bose einstein condensate, but between a different set of forms, and on a larger scale? havent seen the video, will download at home, but for those that would know, is an arc welder ac or dc? ditto the devices hes using to generate the balls.
On 6/17/05, William Beaty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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 still appear to be fairly large spheres. And they seem to have a > distinct surface. And they appear to clearly shrink as they cool. > > Finally here's the same phenomenon captured on video. Doesn't look like > an illusion now. I bet the "illusion explanation" is wrong. > > 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. > > 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 > ions? > > 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? > 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.f > > 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. > > > (((((((((((((((((( ( ( ( ( (O) ) ) ) ) ))))))))))))))))))) > William J. Beaty SCIENCE HOBBYIST website > billb at amasci com http://amasci.com > EE/programmer/sci-exhibits amateur science, hobby projects, sci fair > Seattle, WA 206-789-0775 unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci > > -- "Monsieur l'abbé, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write" Voltaire
