What is ball lightning, physically?
What causes ball lightning -- the rare glowing, floating orbs of light, sometimes seen after ordinary lightning strikes, that can persist for seconds and even pass through windows or walls?
History and references
Still open in the literature as of 2026.
Ball lightning has been reported for centuries, with thousands of eyewitness accounts including its passage through closed windows and appearance inside aircraft, but reproducible laboratory generation of a long-lived free-floating luminous ball under natural-strike conditions remains elusive. Proposed mechanisms include burning silicon nanoparticles from vaporized soil (Abrahamson & Dinniss, 2000), microwave-trapped plasma (Wu, 2016), and various exotic models, but no single theory accounts for the full range of reported properties (size, lifetime, ability to pass through glass, lack of heat damage). Walker's book explicitly lists ball lightning among phenomena still awaiting a settled explanation, and that remains true.
It is one of the last common weather phenomena that physics genuinely cannot yet explain end to end.
Explanations that circulated
- It is simply an afterimage or optical illusion left in the observer's eye
- It is always ignited burning silicon nanoparticle dust from soil vaporized by a strike (proposed by Abrahamson & Dinniss 2000, but does not explain all reported cases)
References
- Theory of ball lightning, A. V. Bychkov, V. L. Bychkov, A. I. Klimov (review of models), arXiv preprint, 2014
Solutions 0
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