Reply To: heaviest element plasmoid fusion?

[Jan Hemmer]

meemoe_uk, never thought this would happen!

Back in the eighties I had the same idea, the fusion of 2 oxygen into a sulphur nucleus as the energy source of ball lightning.
I remember also corresponding about it with a few people in the UK.
Maybe after all this time the meme spread somehow.
The problem with fusion like that, i was told by experts in the field, is the fact that when two nuclei of the same mass merge into one, the result is momentum = zero.
That means there is no resulting particle that can take all the released energy, in other words no kinetic energy is involved.
All the mass-energy has to be released in the form of EM radiation.
Now I was led to this oxygen-sulphur fusion idea by an article in Nature by AJF. Blair who described an old case of Ball Lightning in a church, when during the presence of the BL it was impossible to ring the bells.
From the energies involved in that case he could calculate the magnetic field required to prevent the bells from swinging.
To me doing that made a lot of sense because a strong magnetic field is the only known force that can cause the erratic behavior often reported in BL cases.
However extending that calculation to the energy of the magnetic field of Blair’s BL (= magnetic pressure x volume) gave such a startling figure that it only could be caused by nuclear processes.
So my hypothesis was and still is, that the mass energy released was in the form of the energy of a static magnetic field.
And also caused by a strong initiating magnetic field of a lightning current, resulting in a magnetic chain reaction so to speak!
Unfortunately this concept appeared to be too much outside the trodden paths to be taken seriously.
But I keep wondering….