Ball lightning
What is the physical mechanism that produces ball lightning — the luminous, floating, sometimes room-sized spheres of light occasionally reported during thunderstorms — and can it be reliably reproduced in the lab?
History and references
Still open in the literature as of 2026.
Ball lightning has been reported for centuries as glowing, floating spheres associated with thunderstorms, but is rare, unpredictable, and has never been reliably produced or studied in controlled lab conditions matching all reported properties (size, duration, ability to pass through glass). Competing hypotheses include vaporized-silicon nanoparticle combustion, trapped microwave-plasma cavities, and vortex-ring plasma models, each explaining some but not all reported behaviors. As of the 2020s it remains listed among unsolved problems in atmospheric electricity, with no consensus mechanism.
It is one of the few genuine unsolved mysteries you might witness with your own eyes during an ordinary thunderstorm.
Explanations that circulated
- That ball lightning is simply an optical illusion or hallucination — thousands of independent eyewitness reports including radar/photographic evidence argue against this being purely perceptual
- That the 2000 silicon-vaporization hypothesis (Abrahamson & Dinniss) is a confirmed, complete explanation; it remains one competing model among several, unconfirmed in general
References
- Relativistic-microwave theory of ball lightning, Yuan-Kang Wu, Scientific Reports, 2016
Solutions 0
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