Ed Lewis on Ball Lightning Plasmoids Matsumoto and Shoulders
(Comment on Matsumoto and Kapitsa’s approach to BL at around 50 minutes in the video) Pyotr Kapitsa and Paul Dirac were friends at Cambridge where Kapitsa spent over 10 years at the Cavendish Laboratory. Dirac also visited Kapitsa in the USSR after Kapitsa returned there in 1934. So if we want to understand Kapitsa’s ideas about ball lightning we should also look to Dirac’s antimatter research and anything Dirac might have to say about it. I learned about Kapitsa from the excellent book The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo.
Does anyone know in what years Kapitsa’s BL research took place? After his Nobel Prize?? (I recall that Brian Josephson switched to studing esoteric fields immediately after his Nobel Prize, which afforded him the possibility of remaining in a conventional institution simultaneously with being associated with ‘dodgy’ subjects!)
The Farmelo book did not mention Kapitsa’s BL research specifically. (I would have remembered that.) However, according to Wikipedia, his Nobel prize for low-temperature physics and the discovery of cosmic background radiation was shared with Pensias and Wilson in 1978. BL research in Europe and Russia goes back to 1753 with the deadly Richmann experiment in St. Petersburg. So it had to be back in the 20s and 30s with Dirac at the Kapitsa Club, which was considered the “cool” place to hang out with him. Wouldn’t you guys love to know what he and Dirac said about BL?
wow, 1753. So, it’s been a long time in the making…
I have seen ball lightning twice both in same place over a decade apart. It was at Abreu Grogan Park on the Dan river. Both times a sudden thunder storm was coming on. It would happen when the wind was churning the river but rain wasn’t falling yet. It could possible relevant that there is nonfunctional power generators 300 or so yards down the river.
