#ball-lightning — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #ball-lightning, aggregated by home.social.
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"Though ball lightning has been reported by eyewitnesses for centuries, very few photographs or other objective data exist that can be unequivocally described as evidence of ball lightning. In this article, we analyze a video recording made during a thunderstorm in Bozeman, Montana, in August of 2023 that shows objects less than 10 m from the camera. Many of the characteristics of these objects match those attributed to ball lightning, such as duration and estimated luminosity, although the possibility that they were burning objects from a power-line arc cannot be eliminated."
https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.5038?af=R
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Very very frightening ME!
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‘Ball Lightning’ Soars High And Falls Short
Ball Lightning (2005) by Cixin Liu and translated by Joel Martinsen is good. It’s really good. For the first two-thirds. Unfortunately Ball Lightning changes tack and loses steam in the last third. Fortunately, though, Cixin Liu builds up enough momentum to carry the story to completion.
Chen is not your typical scientist. Traumatised as a child Chen has turned that trauma into an obsession. An obsession with finding and understanding ball lightning. Maybe then he can put his parents’ ghosts to rest.
But Chen is not alone in his obsession. The beautiful Lin Yun also wants to understand ball lightning. But for reasons entirely her own. And the too brilliant physicist Ding Yi doesn’t care about ball lightning at all except that it’s another problem for him to solve.
Working together the three sees ball lightning as the answer but to three completely different questions. With the spectre of war looming the leaders of China are impatient for results. Ding Yi, Lin Yun, and Chen could lead the world into a bright new future or end it entirely.
Ball Lightning immediately grabs the reader and sweeps them up in a world of scientific mystery. Cixin Liu poses many questions revolving around one principle question; what is ball lightning? The story revolves around Chen trying to answer this and many other questions.
If this sounds dull, I assure you Cixin Liu does not make it dull. Cixin Liu plots a story that shines a romantic light on the struggle for understanding in science. Cixin Liu makes that struggle as thrilling as any two-fisted fight for survival found anywhere else. And he does so without unnecessary technical details or dumbing down relevant concepts. Cixin Liu respects the reader enough to treat them as equals to the geniuses he writes about.
One of Cixin Liu’s great talents is to bring his characters to life with immediately relatable feelings and motivations. He does so without needing to belabour any pointless minutiae. Cixin Liu has an almost magical ability paint his characters with only a few deft strokes to reveal what we know to be there.
Ball Lightning layers mystery, intrigue, and tension as the story progresses. Chen’s story becomes our story as he and his team travel the world seeking the answer to ball lightning. But Cixin understands that no path to enlightenment is straight and that the ultimate answers may not be to our liking. This element of uncertainty remains with Chen which only strengthens his sympathetic qualities.
What becomes frustrating, however, is in the final third of the book. For the first two-thirds Chen has been the narrator and main protagonist. For some reason Cixin Liu changes style completely and Chen is only a passive observer, content to have the rest of the story related to him. It’s a big letdown to invest in a character only to have them have no influence on the ending.
Cixin LiuThat said, even though Chen becomes irrelevant as a character the story does coast to an okay ending. In the last third the story becomes more of a philosophical treatise. Like much of Philip K. Dick’s work, questions about reality and death become the focus. You might not agree with Cixin Liu’s answers but they are interesting nonetheless.
Ball Lightning is a difficult book to classify. It could be classified as hard SF but I think scientific thriller would be more apt. This is because Cixin Liu takes almost no liberties with science that even hard SF must do sometimes.
If you like stories about math, physics, philosophy, and meteorology then Ball Lightning will not disappoint. Don’t read Ball Lightning for the destination but read it for the journey. It’s one that inevitably leads to The Three-Body Problem and a greater appreciation of this great author.
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Wusstet Ihr, dass unsere Forschenden Kugelblitzphänomene bei uns im Labor untersuchen können?
Große leuchtende Plasmakugeln werden mittels einer Hochspannungsentladung über einer Wasseroberfläche erzeugt. Ihre visuellen Eigenschaften kommen den typischen Beschreibungen von Kugelblitzen sehr nahe.
Neulich hat sich ein französisches Filmteam das angeschaut für eine Dokumentation über Blitze bei TV5.#physik #blitz #lightning #balllightning #kugelblitz #physics #plasma
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Ball lightning, a rare and mysterious phenomenon, has been observed and recorded by scientists in China. They used a spectrometer to capture the optical spectrum of a natural ball lightning event that lasted for 1.64 seconds. Their findings suggest that ball lightning is a result of vaporized soil and oxides, rather than plasma or antimatter. #BallLightning #Science #Mystery https://www.iflscience.com/what-does-science-know-about-mysterious-ball-lightning-70139?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=HariTulsidas%2Fmagazine%2FMind+and+Matter
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Skeptoid #38: The Marfa Lights: A Real American Mystery by Brian Dunning #marfalights #ghostlights #balllightning #marfa #SkeptoidPodcast #podcast #bot No matter how much we want these Texas ghost lights to be mysterious, it turns out they're all too mundane.
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4038 -
#LunchtimeReading : Cixin Liu's Ball Lightning, the pick for this month's #Edinburgh SF Book Group, which meets last Tuesday of each month.
#AmReading #books #ScienceFiction #CixinLiu #livres #BallLightning #lunch #dejeuner
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Benedictine monk wrote earliest known reference to ball lightning in England - Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | Trinity College)
... - https://arstechnica.com/?p=1830197 #medievalmanuscripts #historyofscience #medievalengland #gaming&culture #balllightning #features #science #physics