Big Ideas TXST goes inside the fascinating minds forging innovation, research and creativity at Texas State University and beyond. Hosted by Daniel Seed, episodes showcase the thought leaders, breakthroughs and creative expression making the world a better place, one BIG idea at a time. Produced by the Division of University Marketing and Communications at Texas State.
Dan Seed (00:00):
It's 1195 ad you're a monk in England and you observe a fiery globe descending from a storm cloud and falling into the river. Tims, you write down what you've seen in a manuscript, and then 600 years later, you're a member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences and Arts in St. Petersburg, Russia. You're observing the experiment when a globe of blue and whitish fire hits the head of scientist, gorg Richman killing him instantly. In our modern times, maybe you're a pilot and you see flickering balls of light inside the cockpit that they then meander down the interior length of the plane. Are they UFOs, spirits, angels? No. No, and no. I'm Dan Seed from Texas State School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and welcome to Big Ideas. What I've just described are all real situations over the course of history explain not by little green men ghosts or heavenly apparitions. It's a phenomenon known as Ball Lightning. And we're joined this month by Dr. Carl Stefan, a professor in the Ingram School of Engineering who studies Ball Lightning. Dr. Stefan, welcome to the show.
Karl Stephan (01:06):
Well, thank you for inviting me. I appreciate it.
Dan Seed (01:09):
And Dr. Stefan, just as a way of introduction to our audience, can you tell our audience what your background is and what exactly it is that you do over in Ingram?
Karl Stephan (01:17):
Okay. My background professionally is electrical engineering. I have been both an engineering industry and since about 1983 I've been in academia. I've done a number of things in terms of electrical engineering, in terms of microwave engineering and various industrial applications of engineering. But about 15 years ago, I had the opportunity to do some research connected with Ball Lightning Laboratory Research, which is fairly unusual in that field even so, and I've tended to mainly specialize in that since that time, although there are other things I've been doing as well.
Dan Seed (02:01):
And as we move into May, this is really timely. It's traditionally our stormiest season here in central Texas. Lightning storms start to pop up with regularity. They move into the summer. You can go on the internet and find contemporary stories of ball, lightning historical ones like the ones that I mentioned. You mentioned when you first began researching it, have you ever seen this phenomenon yourself outside of a laboratory?
Karl Stephan (02:25):
Well, I haven't seen it outside of a laboratory or inside of a laboratory. And as far as we know, nobody else has either inside a laboratory. If we could make it in a laboratory, it would be a lot easier to do research on it. But unfortunately, although people have produced things that look sort of like Ball Lightning in some respects, nobody has been able to produce an object that acts exactly like most people describe true ball. Lightning acting like I've never seen the real thing personally, but I've talked to dozens of people who have, and there's consistent core of characteristics it has that it's very unlikely that just a bunch of people seeing wacky things at random, they would all agree on these core of characteristics.
Dan Seed (03:14):
And that's what's so fascinating about this too, is the fact that there is that mystery element to it that you've got to be in the right place at the right time. And even for scientists like yourself, people that study this, engineers, it's such a rare phenomenon. I mean, that's got to be fascinating to study something like this that only a few people have seen out in the real world.
Karl Stephan (03:35):
Yeah, it's fascinating. It's also frustrating if you let it do that. It's not a choice that a lot of people would make. In terms of starting out your career, most Ball Lightning researchers have done something else first and got established simply because it is one of the most difficult physical phenomena to research, but probably because of that reason. It's one of the last physical phenomena that you can see at ground level in terms of atmospheric effects and lights and so forth that science still cannot explain. We've explained meteorites, we've explained conventional lightning, we've explained knocked alucian clouds and all sorts of other things that people were mystified by before, but nobody can explain exactly what ball lightning is, how to produce it, and what the scientific explanation is. We just don't have one yet. And yet people see it all the time right up to the present.
Dan Seed (04:38):
So you did mention that the work in laboratories that happens with people trying to simulate it. What are the challenges of simulating in a laboratory and why hasn't that been able to happen yet?
Karl Stephan (04:50):
Well, the difficulty is that all the known physics that we have says that if something glows at the brightness of a light bulb, say a conventional incandescent light bulb for a number of seconds, there's a certain amount of energy that takes and that energy has to come from somewhere. So unless we give up on the principle conservation of energy, which nobody is prepared to do at this point, we have to say that there's an energy source that provides the energy that all lightning is emitting in terms of light. People have had all sorts of theories. There's literally dozens of theories about what the energy source is. There was a popular theory that said it was burning silicon that was reduced from sand in the ground. The trouble with that theory was it required that lightning strike very close to where the ball lightning appears. People have seen this appear inside their bedrooms even when there's no thunderstorm going on.
(05:51):
So that theory really doesn't hold water. Also, burning things tend to rise, like smoke A would naturally go up and ball lightning tends to move more or less horizontally at a slow pace about walking speed. So it just doesn't act like something that's on fire. Another theory has to do with plasma neon signs have plasma inside them. The real neon signs a little glass tubes and a plasma is a area of gas that is highly ionized and glows. Neon signs, however, are plugged into the power. And if you unplug a neon sign or any kind of a plasma and eliminate the power source from a plasma, it tends to go dark in just a few thousandths of a second. But ball lightning glows for people who have seen it for half a minute or so. So it certainly doesn't act like a conventional plasma either. And until we have just the basic category of thing, it is in order to design experiments, it's very difficult to design an experiment to reproduce it.
Dan Seed (06:56):
And there have been many experiments over the years to try to replicate or create ball lightning. They've used everything from say, sheet metal to trees, even bat guano bodies of water. Yet as you mentioned, there's no consensus on how this is created. But some ideas, the thing that I find interesting to me about this is that in a world where almost everything is captured on camera, be it a cell phone, closed circuit traffic, cameras, doorbell cameras, there's very little or perhaps no video evidence showing this happening in real time in nature. Why do you think that is?
Karl Stephan (07:34):
Well, for one thing, ball lightning is rare. It tends to occur close to the ground or at least the ones that people see, because unless they're in an airplane, they're going to be close to the ground themselves. It has a very short lifetime. And if it's not relatively close to the camera, close enough to where you can actually get an idea of how big it is, it just looks like an ordinary light source or it's obscured by trees or something. And so unless people are paying attention to and review all their security camera footage, something like this, it's probably just either going unnoticed or just doesn't appear that much. We are working on some cases where people have seen things that they get off of their security cameras. Most of those tend to be explained by other causes other than Ball Lightning. But there is one case recently that we have received that looks very promising. Let me say we're still analyzing it. If someone sees Ball Lightning and is standing there witnessing it, it takes you about five to 10 seconds to pull out a camera, pull out your phone, turn on the camera and point it at something. By then, typically the ball lightning is gone. So it lasts just not quite long enough to be reliably recorded on a typical smartphone.
Dan Seed (09:04):
Yeah, it's very much, or what it sounds like is a very much right time, right place kind of circumstance that maybe someday a deer camera say will capture it, but it's going to be in the right spot at the right time. So before we get into your research on this and what you're doing in this field, what have you read? What have you experienced or learned about this in terms of being able to describe it to the public? Right? Like you said, it may just look like a light and people may not pay attention to it. What's kind of the consensus? How big is it? What does it look like descriptive wise?
Karl Stephan (09:38):
The size varies from a baseball to a basketball and sometimes a little bit larger, but it's typically six to eight inches in diameter. It's pretty usually spherical. It can be ellipsoidal or even rod like, but most of the time it's just a round sphere. It seems to be opaque that as you can't see inside it, although some people have seen some structure inside some of 'em, it is not terribly bright. It's not blindingly bright. Typically, like I say, it's a brightness of a light bulb. When you can look at a 60 40 watt light bulb without hurting your eyes, the colors vary. They tend to be either white, yellow, or red. Those are the most common colors. Some of them are blue, very few of them are green. Some people who've seen multiple colors in terms of motion, they tend sometimes they're falling down from the sky.
(10:33):
They tend to move horizontally above the ground, three to six feet above the ground. They move around inside houses. Sometimes they appear inside houses and they can go through closed glass windows. This is a real problem for a lot of theories, but numerous eyewitnesses have seen them go through a glass window that is closed. Usually they don't damage the window. Occasionally the window has a punch out, a circular hole after the object goes through it. And actually I'm in the process of publishing a paper on what that means for ball landing. They can vanish without a trace, it just disappears or shrinks. Sometimes they explode and damage things. Sometimes they'll just go out of sight around the corner and you follow it and it's not there anymore. But these are the typical cores of the multiple descriptions. We have the common features. And so that's basically a typical of all lightning type of sighting.
Dan Seed (11:37):
You mentioned that the idea of it passing through glass, and we've heard these stories about it showing up in airplanes and going through cockpits down the length of the airplane. You mentioned that this may be problematic for some of the theories out there. Explain that. Why would that be?
Karl Stephan (11:52):
Well, suppose the theory says that it's made of small particles of silicon. Small particles of silicon are going to have a lot of trouble going through a half inch thick airplane windshield unless they have some kind of really high velocity motion or some crazy thing, they just can't do it. So anything that requires a certain identifiable collection of solid objects to remain the same objects and go through glass, this is just a difficult thing to imagine. It's some sort of energy that is able to go through glass and remain intact in whatever its structure is. And that drills out a lot of physical objects that depend on being able to move through solid stuff.
Dan Seed (12:44):
Sure. And again, we're joined by Dr. Carl Stefan from the Ingram School of Engineering, discussing this phenomenon known as Ball Lightning into your research in 2020. You set out to work with the public to understand what this is. Walk us through that research. How is that going and what's that process?
Karl Stephan (13:02):
Well, I became acquainted with a colleague of mine named Richard Sonnenfeld, who researches Conventional Lightning at the Lme Laboratory in Koro, New Mexico at New Mexico Tech. And he had the really good idea of establishing a website where people could find a questionnaire that they could answer questions about any suspected ball lightning sighting that they had. There were sort of other websites on the web that were just collecting strange phenomena in general, and some of them concerned Ball Lightning. But we said, Hey, let's focus a website on Ball Lightning and let people know that this is where they can report their sighting if they see them. And it's caught on pretty good. Every time I have an interview like this, we often get a burst of reports as people find out about the existence of the site. And so far, since about this time in 2020, we've gotten a toll of over 800 reports. Not all of them are Ball lightning, but a good fraction appear to be Ball Lightning. So we get several a month and it builds up.
Dan Seed (14:13):
And how do you ascertain what is Ball Lightning and what isn't? If it's a phenomenon that's very difficult to pin down, what are the characteristics that you look for?
Karl Stephan (14:22):
Well, one characteristic is whether the phenomenon they described could be explained some other way. For example, during lightning storms or even on a clear day, power lines can arc over. For example, I was in a parking lot a few weeks ago, and somebody had let go of one of these metalized helium balloons and it got caught in a power line and the bloom, it was a windy day, and the bloom blew between two of the wires of the power line. And there was this huge flash, and the power line had actually arced over. It was shorted out. That's a very bright spark or a very bright arc. And from a distance, you'll just see this bright flash and it will, if you go far enough away, it looks kind of circular and you might think, oh, look at that. It was ball lightning caused by that lightning strike. That is a common error, which is understandable. Power line arcs aren't that common either, but there have been reports. In fact, I wrote a paper on an unknown light source out in West Texas. We were actually looking for Marfa lights, which may bear some relationship to bola.
Dan Seed (15:41):
I was going to ask about that. Good. I'm glad you brought that up. That was my next question. Good.
Karl Stephan (15:46):
The gentleman I was working with had a bunch of security cameras monitoring this area, and one night they photographed a very, very bright light. It lit up the clouds for about 40 minutes. And over time, although we published it as an unknown light, the calculations and talking to people have just convinced me that was probably a power line arc because there was a power line in the region that it was cited, especially if it lasts more than 30 seconds or something. It's very unusual for Ball Lightning to last that long. So we make sure that it's not something that could be explained any other way. Now, that's not an airtight process, and at this point, because we don't have a physical theory to compare the data against, it's all somewhat guesswork. But when you look at enough reports from enough people and enough different circumstances, you can kind of get a sense of the average true report of true Ball lightning.
(16:46):
And so if the descriptions people give have details that are inconsistent with that, we'll say probably it's not Ball Lightning, but most of the reports I would say that we get, people have read up on it online and have a fairly good idea of what they've seen and compare it to what other people have seen, and they think that they really have seen it. And in the absence of any other evidence, I tend to agree with them based on the particular report. So it's a subjective thing. It boils down to being subjective at this point. But there's nothing else we can do without putting a whole bunch of instrumentation out there, which we have written a proposal to do, but we haven't heard about the funding yet.
Dan Seed (17:29):
So let me get back quickly here to the Marfa Lights, right? There's been all sorts of explanations and possibilities about that. Dating back to the early 20th century. You go out to Marfa and you stand out there with the platform and you look and maybe that night's not your night, you're not going to see it. Is it possible that those lights are ball lightning or do they fit the characteristics in terms of, because what you've described kind of sounds like it, right? The idea of these white lights showing up, they tend to move or dance around. Do you think that that's a distinct possibility?
Karl Stephan (18:06):
Well, let me preface that by saying when you go out to the Marfa Light viewing area between Alpine and Marfa in the evening and look basically south, you'll very likely see some slowly moving whitish lights near the horizon. And if you look at them with binoculars or telescope, they will appear very fuzzy. They don't look like headlights at all. They look like just some nebulous little light. It turns out that the vast majority of what people see on a typical night out there are in fact headlights. But the light from the headlights has traveled about 15 miles or so through an unstable atmosphere that it's like looking through a piece of wavy glass. The beams are all scrambled up, and you cannot distinguish the two individual headlights. It just looks like this fuzzy ball, and it really does look weird. And that's what people typically see when they go out to the Marfa light viewing area. It's unusual, but it's easily explained as headlights distorted through 15 miles or so of air. On the other hand, we have talked to lots of people who have seen other kinds of lights behaving very differently in other directions, very close up sometimes. And the descriptions that these other lights have resemble ball lightning in several ways except possibly for the duration, the Marfa lights, what we'll call true marfa lights tend to last longer than a typical ball. Lightning sighting will last.
Dan Seed (19:42):
And as you mentioned, just so I'm clear on this, lightning does not need to be present for these to be created. Is that correct or incorrect?
Karl Stephan (19:50):
Ball? Lightning is usually associated with thunderstorms, but not all the time. People have seen ball lightning like phenomenon during and before and after earthquakes, for example. It's a type of earthquake lights. Sometimes lights are typically not associated with thunderstorms. There is some possibility that there's an unusual geological formation out there, which is electrically active in some poorly defined way. It is a geologically interesting area in that it has volcanic origins. And although I'm not a theorist, I'm not proposing theories from lytes, there may be a connection that would under some unusual seismic or geologic circumstances, produce enough voltage on the surface of the earth to create a field that would give rise to Ball Lightning because it does seem to be associated with high electric fields over a large volume of space above the ground.
Dan Seed (20:51):
Well, getting away from the X-Files side of the conversation here, I've read up on your work and I've read up on you, and I've heard you or seen you describe yourself as a wet blanket in the field of fall Lightning scholarship. Why is that? What makes you a wet blanket?
Karl Stephan (21:08):
What makes you popular in science is to discover something new and to show that you've discovered it. There have been several papers over the years which have claimed to have produced Ball Lightning in the laboratory. The wet blanket role is one that I take on because if there's enough detail in the description to reproduce the experiment, this is how I got into the field actually. There was a researcher who had a high power microwave device, and he produced something which he said, geez, this Ball Lightning. And I happened to be working with a gentleman at UT Austin who had the same kind of high power microwave device. We reproduced the experiment and we showed that the object was a plasma. It was much brighter than typical ball lightning, and it went away within milliseconds of turning off the power. And that's not what Ball Lightning does.
(22:05):
Ball lightning floats free in space, lasts for seconds. And we said, well, there may be some connection between this phenomenon and Ball Lightning, but it is not. You're not producing Ball Lightning in the laboratory because it doesn't act like ball light. And there's been several other experiments over the years. People have been discharging capacitors into tanks of electrolyte water with salt in them and getting these glowing balls that rise up slowly. And last for almost a second, there have been people who set fire to silicone, the type of silicon in a silicon chip, just the element silicon. And they make these interesting little white glowing spheres that bounce along the ground and move. The second bounce can be higher than the first because they're kind of jet propelled, and that's interesting. But they don't act like Ball Lightning either. They don't float in the air and they're not six to eight inches in diameter. And there may be some relation between these other experiments and what Ball Lightning truly is, but none of them combine all the features that people describe Ball Lightning having into one phenomenon. And so what I've been doing is saying, well, that's nice, but it's not really ball lightning, and here's why I'm sort of the referee. Maybe
Dan Seed (23:25):
I was going to say, yeah, you seem like the referee, the person that goes, let's hold on here a second and really look at this. Right. I would imagine that when these reports come in or these experiments are done, there's a whole lot of excitement surrounding them like, yes, we did it. And having that scientific voice to go, well, let's take a minute and look at that. That's important. That's science, that's engineering. Yeah.
Karl Stephan (23:49):
It's also a thankless task, but
Dan Seed (23:51):
Right.
Karl Stephan (23:53):
If we really believe that science is self-correcting, somebody needs to correct it. And I can, so far, people have published my papers typically, although perhaps with reluctance, it's one of those things that needs to be done.
Dan Seed (24:11):
I do want to circle back and then I want to ask about your paper that you're working on. You mentioned the damage or whatnot that can happen to glass, and I missed following up on this, so I wanted to do it now, typically, what do you see in terms of damage done to be it homes, landscapes, whatnot, in these cases where you can look and go, yeah, we think that's Ball Lightning. Is there a common kind of issue that comes from it in terms of destruction or damage?
Karl Stephan (24:38):
Well, if there's any electrical devices in the vicinity and the ball lightning explodes, it typically does damage electrical devices, televisions, radios, light bulbs, blown out computers, trash modems, this sort of thing. Not always, but it can happen. There can be burn marks in various places, although not a lot of people say that they sense any heat coming from Ball Lightning, even when it comes very close to them within a yard or so.
Dan Seed (25:06):
Interesting.
Karl Stephan (25:06):
Yes. The other kinds of damage, a few people have been injured and perhaps even killed. You've mentioned George Richmond by Ball Lightning. So if anyone sees it resists the temptation to stick your hand into it, this is not a good idea. If you're going to use your hands, pull out your smartphone and take a video, don't touch it. So those kinds of damage, I can do physical damage in terms of knocking things around, those are the main kinds of problems that you get.
Dan Seed (25:35):
And this paper that you mentioned that you're working on, what does that relate to? Okay, the
Karl Stephan (25:42):
Paper. Yeah. Well, ball Lightning moves about a yard a second or so. So when it goes through a glass window, it takes less than a second to move through the window. The types of damage that have been seen, which are probably due to ball lighting, not all these incidents were witnessed personally. They just find the damage afterwards. But the typical situation is that there's a round hole in the glass window, maybe an inch or two in diameter, and sometimes they can find the intact disc that fell out of the hole. What has to happen to produce that sort of damage is very interesting. The glass inside the disc has to be heated up to where it becomes soft, and that's about 500 centigrade close to a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Then it has to cool down, and when it cools down, it becomes stiff again. But it's expanded when it's stiff because it's hot.
(26:41):
When it contracts, it literally pulls away from the surrounding glass and you get a circular crack and the center falls out. So there's kind of a three step process that goes on. Now, I've done some calculations about what it would take to heat glass that hot in less than a second, and it takes power levels in excess of a megawatt, at least for a reasonably large size of diameter. Now, a megawatt is a lot of power. It's not delivered for very long. If you try to deliver that power by only I radiating the surface of the glass, it doesn't get through in time. Glass is a very poor conductor of heat, and although some kind of a surface only phenomenon is possible, it's unlikely. So it appears that the ball lightning heats the volume of the glass, not just the surface very rapidly where it softens, and then as it cools, it pulls away from the surrounding glass and falls out.
Dan Seed (27:42):
Wow, that's really interesting. To put that in perspective for our audience, they hear megawatt, what kind of electrical device or power line or whatnot generates a megawatt?
Karl Stephan (27:54):
Well, let's see. Diesel locomotive probably generates on the order of a hundred kilowatts or something. So several diesel locomotives or a very small power station. Now, again, this is a very short amount of time, so you're not going to be able to hook up ball lightning and run your house or anything. But although who knows what the energy storage medium is, it may be useful. But a megawatt is a lot of power. You could light up numerous homes with the megawatt typical house might use 10 kilowatts, so you could light up 50 to a hundred homes or something with a megawatt. Wow. But only for a few seconds. Less than a sec.
Dan Seed (28:37):
Yeah, still that's a whole lot of electrical energy there. That's a lot of power. That's a lot of power. So we've got time for a couple more questions here. I want to give you an opportunity to give people information about that website. You mentioned that there may be after things like this, people tend to go, oh yeah, I think I saw something. What's that website? If you could give it to our audience?
Karl Stephan (28:57):
Well, if you Google Ball Lightning Report website, it will come up on the first page. But yeah, it's the one that's at New Mexico Tech, and it would be in the first page if you Google Ball Lightning Report website.
Dan Seed (29:10):
Great. And last question for you. You mentioned you've been in academia since 1983, Carl Stefan going for his PhD in electrical engineering. Did you ever think that your career would lead you here to this phenomenon? I mean, it's just such a fascinating thing.
Karl Stephan (29:29):
Well, I first learned about Ball Lightning when I was in high school. I was going through a Fort Worth Public library stacks and just bumbled across a book that had been recently published, ball Lightning. And I read the book, and it was really interesting. I didn't know anybody who'd seen it or anything, and I just put it in the back of my mind Someday I'm going to look into that. And it was still in the back of my mind about 15 years ago when I saw this paper by the people who were making it, said that they'd made it with microwaves. I said, well, here, let's see if we can reproduce it. And one thing led to another, and thank goodness I have tenure and I can research fault lining. So that's how I got to doing this stuff.
Dan Seed (30:12):
Well, we're glad you do, because this is really fascinating. It's been a great discussion with you, Dr. Carl Steffan. Thank you so much for your time.
Karl Stephan (30:19):
Well, thank you, Dan,
Dan Seed (30:20):
And thank you for the pleasure of your time in downloading and listening to another episode of Big Ideas. We'll be back next month with a new episode. Until then, stay well and stay informed.
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