Related papers: Retrospective Observation of Ball Lightning
In 1978, John McKay made an intriguing observation: 196884=196883+1. Monstrous Moonshine is the collection of questions (and a few answers) inspired by this observation. Like moonlight itself, Moonshine is an indirect phenomenon. Just as in…
Formation of a lightning within a cloud, between clouds and towards the earth is studied as an application of sociophysics. The three dimensional society is sky or cloud, which has members as electrically charged clouds (in sky) or patches…
In the last few years, the so-called flyby anomaly has been widely discussed, but remains still an illusive topic. This is due to the harsh conditions experienced during an Earth flyby as well as due to the limited data available. In this…
The plausibility of uncommon events and miracles based on testimony of such an event has been much discussed. When analyzing the probabilities involved, it has mostly been assumed that the common events can be taken as data in the…
Lightning in planetary atmospheres is now a well-established concept. Here we discuss the available detection techniques for, and observations of, planetary lightning by spacecraft, planetary landers and, increasingly, sophisticated…
This is a write-up of a lecture at the level of a physics colloquium. There exists an idealized mathematical formulation of strong interactions which has no free parameters but is known to describe the real world quite accurately. Over the…
Astrometric observations of microlensing events were originally proposed to determine the lens proper motion with which the physical parameters of lenses can be better constrained. In this proceeding, we demonstrate that besides this…
The field of ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions is today a flourishing activity both on the experimental and on the theoretical side. Although the theoretical justifications to study these collisions was given already more than three…
Ten years ago humankind achieved the first direct observation of gravitational waves. I give some personal recollections of that first detection. I also present an incomplete summary of what we have learned since then, and some speculations…
In extreme scattering events, the brightness of a compact radio source drops significantly, as light is refracted out of the line of sight by foreground plasma lenses. Despite recent efforts, the nature of these lenses has remained a…
The modern picture of the neutrino as a multiple mass highly mixed neutral particle has emerged over 40 years of study. Best known of the issues leading to this picture was the apparent loss of neutrinos coming from the sun. This article…
Fireballs are infrequently recorded by seismic sensors on the ground. If recorded, they are usually reported as one-off events. This study is the first seismic bulk analysis of the largest single fireball data set, observed by the Desert…
In nature there are various pairs of observed phenomena and observing scientific techniques which are elegantly coupled with each other. A very general and well known example is the fact that the metal we use to build telescopes were once…
The nature of ball lightning (BL) is pure electric and can be described by simple equations following to elementary considerations of equality of translational acceleration and velocity of the ions and electrons, a spherical-like dipole BL…
Understanding human dynamics is of major scientific and practical importance and can be increasingly addressed in a quantitative fashion thanks to electronic records capturing various human activity patterns. The authors of Ref. [1] revisit…
A chronicle describing the historical context and the development of ideas and experiments leading to the discovery of the back-bending phenomenon in rapidly rotating atomic nuclei some 50 years ago is presented. The moment of inertia of…
I review the main observational achievements concerning GRB optical afterglows occurred in the past two years. Their emission seems to be well interpreted in terms of the `fireball' model, although a variety of behaviours are observed.…
The most distant -ray burst yet sighted is the earliest astronomical object ever observed in cosmic history. This ancient beacon offers a glimpse of the little-known cosmic dark ages.
Helicity is a property of light which is familiar from particle physics but less well-known in optics. In this paper we recall the explicit form taken by the helicity of light within classical electromagnetic theory and reflect upon some of…
In this paper, the author brings further details regarding his Lightning Ball observation that were not mentioned in the first one (Ref.1-2). Additionally, he goes more into detail as the three forces that are necessary to allow the…