The peculiarity of the image of the firebird is that the fire here is not just alive, it has intelligence.
There are many fairy tales where the firebird is mentioned: from simple and short plots to large ones, in which the image of a wonderful bird is just a link in a chain of incredible events that take place with the main character, a good fellow.
In these tales, the king or king must hear about a miracle and strive to get his hands on it. One of the miracles is this very firebird. Often she is not the ultimate goal of the protagonist's adventures, but only leads him through a series of events to the beautiful princess, to reign in a happy marriage.
The simplest story about the firebird is as follows: “In a certain kingdom, distant lands - in the thirty-tenth state there lived a strong, mighty king. That tsar had a great archer, and a great archer had a heroic horse. Once the archer rode on his horse into the forest to hunt. He rode, rode along a wide road and ran into the golden feather of the firebird: how the feather glows like a fire!
And then the heroic horse says to the archer: "Do not take a pen, take it - you will know the grief!"
The good fellow became thoughtful. If you raise a pen and bring a pen to the king, can the emperor reward generously, but who does not value royal favor? He did not obey his horse, raised the feather of the firebird, and brought it to the king.
Thank! - says the king. - But if you got one feather, get me the bird itself, and you won't get it - my sword, your head off your shoulders!
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Someone will whip them …
What is a firebird, what secret meaning can be hidden behind it? This is a flying fire, moreover compact, the size of a bird, behaving very mysteriously. Catching him is given only to the most daring fellow, whom a wise wife (or someone else) tells how to catch. But a good fellow is only a performer. The will (yang principle) to catch the bird comes from the king, and the way (yin wisdom) comes from the wife. This is the general alignment of many fairy tales.
If we assume that the fabulous image of the firebird has a natural prototype, then it is difficult to imagine anything more suitable than ball lightning. Ball lightning is the same fire that flies, and in its appearance it looks exactly like a bird.
Our ancestors, of course, saw ball lightning and could not pass by this rare mysterious phenomenon. Naturally, such a miracle of nature aroused genuine interest - the desire to understand its natural essence and design.
I must say that until now collisions with ball lightning end in different ways. Someone will whack them with a whip, someone will drive them away with a broom, someone will throw a stone … But no one managed to catch the ball lightning, let alone lock them in a cage. But the fact that the image of the firebird was written off from ball lightning is beyond doubt: even in fairy tales its appearance is accompanied by natural disturbances: "Suddenly the forest rustled, waves rose on the sea - the firebird is flying …"
All this is very similar to the appearance of real ball lightning, which happens to be driven by waves and trees bending.
Once the inhabitants of a remote Ural village, standing on the high bank of a small forest river, saw a black ball floating, buzzing strongly. It crackled and made an incredible noise. In the course of its movement along the river there was a wave and a half meter high, and trees broke along the banks at the same height. When the ball approached the village, everyone decided that the end of the world had come - such horror he instilled in people; many fell to their knees and began to pray. The ball slowly passed by, pushed the roof off the bathhouse on the bank and went down the river into the forest. And then an unprecedentedly strong thunderstorm burst out.
Talk to fire
The most important feature of the image of the firebird is that the fire here is not just alive, it has intelligence. But real fireballs sometimes behave so “intelligently” that it takes you astonishingly. Among some researchers of the phenomenon of ball lightning there is even an opinion that it is endowed with reason, that it is an independent form of life.
For example, Vlail Kaznacheev, an academician of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, believes that along with the habitual form of existence, there is also a field form of life. “This is a kind of energetic substance,” explains the academician, “possibly of a plasma type. And she has the rudiments of intelligence."
The author heard an eyewitness account that ball lightning, hitting the hut, flew around everyone sitting at the dining table and hit one woman in the side, stabbing her to death. The most surprising thing is that the unfortunate woman turned out to be the only one seriously ill at that time in the house - she suffered from an illness precisely in the side struck by lightning. Is it an accident or something else?
Perhaps it is not for nothing that the ancient storytellers called the flying fire the firebird. Of course, they did not know theories of plasma, but it turns out that they felt its living essence. Maybe because of this, the attempts of the last decades to create a controlled plasma have failed, that physicists do not see its most important property - vitality? However, many can see, but they are not yet able to figure it out.
Let us allow ourselves an excerpt from the work of the authoritative expert in the field of plasma physics F. Chen: “We live in that part of the Universe, which makes up one percent of it, where plasma does not naturally arise. Plasma in many cases behaves as if it itself is endowed with intelligence."
These words of a recognized specialist in the field of plasma are expensive! But it is not enough to recognize plasma as reasonable, it is necessary to have its theory. Such theories were developed, but this is how the Nobel Prize for Experimental Plasma Research H. Alfven assesses them: “Despite the fact that theories were generally accepted, the plasma itself refused to obey them. Instead, many important effects were found in plasma that were not taken into account by theory …"
The fact that ball lightning is a clot of plasma has already become a general opinion, and, like ordinary plasma, "ball" puts modern science at a standstill, starting with motion. Observers note that lightning usually travels slowly. But one pilot talked about a fireball that floated for several minutes in front of the nose of his plane, moving at a speed of 520 kilometers per hour.
Ball lightning trajectories are also difficult to explain. The glowing balls either gently fly around the room, keeping at the same height, then they move along the wires, or they write out strange zigzags.
Some researchers have tried to explain the movement of ball lightning by wind or drafts, but there are cases when lightning slowly rolled along the wing of a flying plane, despite the wind.
The contacts of ball lightning with a person look especially strange. They simply amaze with their illogicality. In one case, lightning easily overturns the tractor, in the other it explodes upon light contact with the car, in the third, it allows the motorcyclist to run over itself.
Unfortunately, not all meetings of ball lightning with a person end peacefully. The well-known ufologist Maxim Karpenko cites rather sad results of such contacts: of the 412 known cases, 17 people lost consciousness, 4 were injured, 7 died.
Into what world is the window
Many of the eyewitnesses who met ball lightning talked about it as a living being. What is life in the form of pure energy? Recently, some physicists dealing with problems that are on the border of traditional science have suggested that ball lightning is a product of a quantum vacuum that permeates our planet and all of outer space. He is by no means emptiness and has tremendous energy, the ability to memorize information.
Ufologist Maxim Karpenko gave an unexpected explanation for the amazing behavior of ball lightning: “Eyewitness accounts of encounters with ball lightning, like pieces of a mosaic, put together, create an image of an amazing creature with an incomprehensible mind and logic - a kind of plasma clot formed at the place of local concentration of energy and absorbed into yourself a part of this energy, self-organized and evolving towards awareness of the surrounding world and yourself in it."
It is not without reason that Pyotr Kapitsa, who at the end of his life tried to create ball lightning in laboratory conditions (figuratively speaking, to drive the firebird into a cage), eventually said: “Ball lightning is a window to another world”. Which one is so different? What did the scientist mean? Perhaps the fact that ahead is the era of a completely different physics?
There is no such cell yet
Catching (taming) the firebird in fairy tales is very difficult. After all, the firebird is a rare and even moral entity. Only a person with a strong spirit and a good disposition can catch her, since what the firebird gives can bring real happiness to the hero. If someone wants to use it for the sake of self-interest, he will only receive trouble in return. The Firebird gives a miracle only to the most worthy.
And, as far as we know, the image of this wonderful bird is found mainly in Russian folk tales. Of course, fireballs flew in other countries, but why then in foreign fairy tales and folklore this phenomenon was not reflected? Didn't hope to catch?
Maybe in the future we will be able to create ball lightning, to master thermonuclear energy. By the way, the proposal for the use of controlled thermonuclear fusion for industrial purposes and the scheme using thermal insulation of high-temperature plasma by an electric field were first formulated by the Soviet physicist O. A. Lavrentyev in mid-1950. HELL. Sakharov and I. E. Tamm in 1951 proposed to modify the scheme, showing the theoretical basis of a thermonuclear reactor, where the plasma would have the shape of a torus and be confined by a magnetic field.
The term "tokamak" was coined later by I. N. Golovin, a student of Academician Kurchatov. Initially it sounded like "tokamag" - short for "magnetic toroidal chamber". But N. A. Yavlinsky, the author of the first toroidal system, suggested replacing "-mag" with "-mac" for euphony. Later this name was borrowed in many languages. The first tokamak was built in 1954, and for a long time tokamaks existed only in our country.
Well, as they say, let's wait and see who catches and tames the firebird.
Pavel Guslyar