Eli5 are ball lightnings real and if so, how do they work?
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Well, this is a difficult question to answer- because we quite literally do not know!
We have many credible accounts of it, but little evidence. The accounts have reasonably good consistency for a one-time event that surprised people and then disappeared in a few moments. It is also very rare!
We have not been able to reproduce it in the lab. We can make electrical discharges of course but none like this. We don’t have any credible theories that explain this. It’s related to lightning, but no known physics can explain how energy can form a ball with no connection to a power source and stick around for even a few seconds.
It acts like a high frequency electrical plasma discharge, but there’s no power source. It is most often associated with thunderstorms and many accounts say it entered through a window or chimney, but some accounts say it materialized inside closed buildings and travel through walls. The thunderstorm may be a source of energy but there’s nothing connecting it to the clouds like regular lightning. Thunderstorms also don’t produce high frequency RF current that could glow like this. If it did, we’d have noticed the huge amount of RF interference from a power source like this.
Many accounts say it ends with a bang and can destroy electrical equipment, or even kill people.
It’s very fascinating because you can imagine throwing energy as balls could be really useful. Could you transmit power at a distance? Anything “new” like this could have countless industrial uses. Is it actually an energy source, like cold fusion? It’s difficult to rule anything out when we don’t know
My mom actually saw this once, she had no idea what it was. Downstairs bathroom, closed windows, materialized during a thunderstorm and rolled into a sheetrock wall. Later discovered some electronics on the other side of that wall were fried.
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