Sharon Hill
Complicated biological machine
- Joined
- Dec 16, 2014
- Messages
- 1,858
- Location
- Pennsylvania, USA
It’s not for lack of trying. Scientific theories about ball lightning have been floating around since the 19th century. Lots of them in the 1970s to the present were proposed suggesting all sorts of mechanisms from vortex rings, plasma, plasmoids, chemical reactions, charge seperation, nuclear processes, etc. The trouble is, this phenomenon (though it may be more than one thing) is ephemeral and hard to observe and recreate under controlled conditions. That makes it difficult to study and make any progress. Maybe someday someone will get lucky.It seems to me that there is no reason to expect explanations to be resolutely fixed within current scientific knowledge. And so, yes, the plasma/EMF hypothesis does push the problem down the road a bit, but at least there's a road. There is a direction to investigate.
There is a lot more to discover with plasma/EMF/ball lightning. And at least ball lightning is, at very long last, being taken seriously by science.
We're getting somewhere -- slowly.