Ball lightning is not an electrical phenomenon at all, but a banal hallucination. More precisely, the result of exposure to the brain of a magnetic field from ordinary lightning
Austrian physicists from the University of Innsbruck analyzed the magnetic fields that occur during thunderstorms from nearby lightning strikes. Comparison of these fields with those used by psychophysiologists in experiments on stimulating the cerebral cortex made it possible to come to the conclusion that ball lightning may not actually exist at all, the scientists argue in an article proposed for publication in the journal Physics Letters A.
Elusive lightning
Ball lightning is perhaps one of the most mysterious atmospheric phenomena. Many eyewitness accounts describe it as a brightly glowing blob that travels through the air during a thunderstorm, sometimes followed by an explosion or even melting of window panes.
However, there are relatively few videos showing ball lightning, and with photographic evidence of the phenomenon, things are just as deplorable. From a technical point of view, catching ball lightning is far from easy, because even if all stories about it are considered true, the probability that an arbitrarily taken person will see a luminous ball during a thunderstorm does not exceed 0.01%. In other words, 9999 people out of ten thousand will never see this phenomenon.
In the 1970s, the journal Science and Life, whose audience then amounted to several million people throughout the USSR, conducted a special survey and collected several hundred letters with descriptions of ball lightning, but it was not possible to understand the nature of the phenomenon. And if we talk about what is known absolutely for sure today, it is the following:
ball lightning is seen during thunderstorms
ball lightning looks like a luminous ball with a diameter of several centimeters to a meter
lightning travels slowly through the air, sometimes rolling on the floor or other surface
The rest of the properties are already not so reliably established. Some descriptions, for example, contain references to the explosion of ball lightning - but how to prove that the documented damage is not associated with a conventional discharge?
On video
Discharge between power lines in Saudi Arabia after being struck by conventional lightning. It is unlikely that this effect can be considered a classic ball lightning, but at least it was filmed with a decent enough quality.
Promotional video:
To understand lightning, one must understand that lightning does not exist?
Lack of objective evidence (for example, high-quality video recording, magnetometer readings and thermal imagers) is not the only problem associated with ball lightning. Not everything is clear about what source of energy can provide a long-term, in several tens of seconds, the existence of a luminous bunch of at least a fist size.
Electromagnetic field? In an ordinary home microwave oven, you can get a small cloud of plasma, but this requires microwave radiation, which is clearly not observed during a thunderstorm.
Nuclear reactions? Not that temperature, and no traces of radiation were ever recorded. Due to a thermonuclear reaction, the Sun shines, but for the fusion of atomic nuclei, ultra-high temperatures are needed, many times higher than those that occur during thunderstorms.
Gas burning? And where does it come from in the atmosphere?
None of the versions, including those that were tried to be supported by laboratory experiments, did not become generally accepted - therefore, Austrian physicists proposed another hypothesis, according to which there is no lightning at all.
What then is there? Hallucination, according to the study authors. Why do many people see it? Because a hallucination is not simple: it is caused not so much by mass autosuggestion as by the effect of magnetic fields on the brain. Stimulation of the brain with magnetic fields has recently been tested as a therapeutic method for depression, and physiologists knew about the ability of a powerful field to create visual phantoms before.
The power of suggestion
An illustrative example of self-hypnosis, perhaps, is the "Chinese AIDS", "infected" with which people sometimes claim that they have picked up the virus in a way that is obviously impossible for HIV infection, for example, through a common telephone receiver. The symptoms of the disease are also developing at a rate atypical for real AIDS.
Lightning, meanwhile, we are talking about ordinary linear lightning, may well create just such fields. A close discharge into a lightning rod, the roof of a house or a tree forms an electromagnetic pulse, which can not only disable sensitive equipment, but also ensure that a glowing spot appears in front of the eyes.
The spot will float before the eyes like the afterimages that appear after looking at a bright object when looking at a flat surface. The only difference is that the color of the spots will be white or gray - at least this is the appearance of the phenomenon reported by those volunteers whose brains were exposed to magnetic fields of similar intensity.
Of course, it won't be easy to prove that ball lightning is just a hallucination. But at least the theory of Austrian physicists is testable: if someone manages to catch a real ball lightning and register it with scientific equipment, it will be possible to give up on the theory of "magnetic phantoms".