July 17, 2006

It's a plasma universe

Difficult to find and witnessed by thousands, many scientists catagorize ball lightning with things that should be ignored, along with Sasquatch, UFO's and a good underarm deoderant.

Pace VanDevender recently retired as a vice-president at Sandia National Laboratory, after 30 years of working on fusion and power systems. During this time he became a Senior Member of the IEEE, a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He plans to spend the next 20 years working on what you see here, ball lightning.

Ordinary ball lightning is described as some kind of plasma that spontaneously appears in mid-air, floating through closed rooms, airplanes, submarines and might last as long as 15 seconds. They're probably the kind of thing found at places like Marfa, Texas and Quapaw, Oklahoma. All of which is a little too mellow for our esteemed researcher. His interest is extreme ball lightning.

Pace describes extreme ball lightning as something that can:

- last up to 20 minutes
- pass through walls, glass and metal without leaving a hole
- float along at 3 feet per second
- is lethal
- cause significant damage
- contain energy in excess of chemicals or electrostatics
- leave black streaks on corpses
- excavate tons of earth

Pace investigated the site of one ball that was observed in Ireland back in 1868. It traveled about a mile, then stopped and excavated over 7,000 cubic feet of water saturated peat.

	Web www.quantumfog.com

Home

Copywrite 2005-2006, all rights reserved, permission to quote with attribution.