Prize is too low. Says it only delivers 38 gallons of gas equivalent energy, assuming no loss which there will be.

You'd probably need a very large balloon to overcome the weight of the string

Maybe just salt water and skip the filings?

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I tried to find this after reading your comment and the amount of nonsense AI tornado videos is a lot to wade through. Wasn't able to find it.

Orrrrrr, there are always tons of cosmic rays of the type that create lightning hitting earth, there just aren't the conditions necessary for those rays to trigger lightning except for when there's a big storm. I imagine the clouds are a different electrical environment than a regular sky and maybe in those conditions a cosmic rays will trigger lightning. Like a gigantic bubble chamber made of our atmosphere.

Well, the primary particles that hit the atmosphere are mostly protons. They cause avalanche of secondaires that are varied but mostly muons,

As others have mentioned you are correct. But Earth's atmosphere has plenty of all forms of matter. A proton can interact with mostly anything and accelerate it. So you can find high energy everything in low earth orbit.

no detectable ELECTRICAL charge, but they do contain "energy", and do attract with other particles, so I am still ABSOLUTLY totaly correct in my statement. "the universe is an energy gradient", and one of the few absolutes

Sure.

Look at the title. Imagine what you'd expect an article whose title is "What causes lightning?" to say.

Now, here's how the article closes:

"These features suggest that even as explanations get more comprehensive, the case of how lightning really works will keep getting reopened. “It just gets more and more bizarre the more we look,” Dwyer said. “Clearly our very simple pictures here are really incomplete.”

So TLDR, we don't know, we know we don't know, and in fact we anticipate not knowing for quite some time. The article explicitly admits it doesn't know the answer to the question it posed in the title - no, the answer doesn't keep getting more interesting, because we don't have the answer yet.

That's clickbait.

Quanta articles are invariably horribly written, horribly explained, and constantly do this thing where they simultaneously are pretentious and over complicate things while also belabouring simple, elementary concepts. Essentially it’s the worst of every world.

And that’s to say nothing about how they click bait everything.

As a child I saw an acted segment about ball lightning in childrens‘ TV, following a person around the house, and had nightmares for a long time afterwards. The thing is spooky as hell.

As long as you reject the hypothesis of "ionized matter" ball lightning is completely unexplainable. If you accept that ionized matter is hot and gives off plenty of EM radiation, it's pretty simple.

> the role of Quanta is to disseminate and explain expert research to scientifically literate non-experts; it is not meant to be distributing the latest research itself

Quanta articles are invariably horribly written, horribly explained, and constantly do this thing whether they simultaneously are pretentious and over complicate things while also belabouring simple, elementary concepts. Essentially it’s the worst of every world.

And that’s to say nothing about how they click bait everything.

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Well, let's say I just don't understand the popularity of this magazine on HN.