Ball Lightning as a Profound Manifestation of Dark Matter Physics

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

See pdf.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

See attached file

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is a very interesting and extremely novel new paper. I consider myself to be very open-minded (and this is probably one of the reasons I was selected by the editors to review this paper) but I am not fully convinced by this paper and its conclusions yet. I am willing to recommend it for acceptance in the journal, but not until some major revisions are completed, not necessarily major in terms of many more pages. Some of my biggest concerns could probably be addressed with additional paragraphs or even just sentences and/or with relatively simply modifications to what is already written.

But since there are extraordinary claims being made in this work, which are extremely far-reaching in their implications across multiple disciplines of physics and astro very broadly speaking and if correct would warrant not one but multiple Nobel Prizes, this article must necessarily be held to a much higher standard than normal. I will start with "big picture" concerns that do not refer to any one specific line within the paper but must be addressed with major textual changes somehow, before I can recommend publication. I will then follow this list with the (usually) more minor issues I point out for corrections, usually with specific lines or sections called out.

- First, nowhere are the current experimental limits on the coupling strengths of axions addressed that I could find. How does the AQN model evade all current constraints? Is this only in the references? Are they up to date? Axions are mentioned but then the focus is mostly on the antimatter components for most of the paper. Can (near-future) experiments rule AQNs out entirely, indirectly, by ruling axions out directly? Currently, we have results from ADMX, HAYSTAC, BREAD, CAST, ABRACADABRA, DM Radio, and many others I can list, but the author gets the point. There are even axion (and ALP) constraints from experiments primarily focused on WIMPs, such XENON and LZ. This is an enormous gap in the text right now as far as I am concerned, especially since, depending on how this comment is answered, this might undermine the entire premise of the paper, if the right "type" of axion is already ruled out. (If the AQNs require axions below current experimental limits, then everything is OK, but this must be stated extremely clearly within the article then, and very early on.)

- BL -- why can this occur sometimes with NO storms? (UAPs / UAVs for example with *no* storm, at multiple different velocities both very fast and very slow, with different behaviors and altitudes). You do mention different baryon numbers and energies many times in the text, but this fundamental issue was still not clear enough to me, and this issue affects your UFO sections the most. (Primary versus secondary AQN helps too?)

- You seem to only explain a small fraction of UAP. What about claims of intelligent behavior? Or eyewitnesses who claim there are occupants? To be clear, I am not suggesting you delve deeper into this topic, still considered very "fringe," but instead I would soften your UAP sections, move them to an appendix, or remove them altogether (perhaps better in a separate paper? Although I recognize would be hard to publish because of the stigma against the topic). Your case weak here at the moment

- You make no mention of earth lights or EQL (earthQUAKE lights). They are typically explained with piezo-electricity in the crust (with or without quakes) and have been used to explain diverse UAP such as the famous Hessdalen Phenomena, but perhaps AQNs are a better explanation? You mention seismic activity in fact multiple times in the paper, but you cite -none- of the work of F. Freund. This is another significant gap within the article, even if you believe this is not connected to AQNs, because if they're not, just say so.

- A serious question: I understand that BL is extremely rare but why is there not more smartphone footage by normal people of BL? Why is the existence of BL still debated within the scientific community, especially within the atmospheric sciences? Part of me feels like this paper is trying to explain one unknown with a different unknown, although I fully recognize that the same question can be asked of UAP and of other BL-like "orbs," Bigfoot and cryptids, etc. But, a substantial fraction of humanity owns cameraphones they carry around in their pockets every day of their lives, so why is it so difficult to e.g. find clear BL videos that are not hoaxes already debunked on YouTube, Vimeo, TikTok? I have tried and I have found perhaps ~5 at best and at least some are fake (e.g., CGI or very obviously AI-generated). To address this myself, I tried looking in the references but unfortunately my university does not appear to subscribe to the relevant journals, and many links in the bibliography are broken. I get page not found errors for many (with the exception of arXiv, but that doesn't have all the papers, at least not the ones most relevant to this problem). If the peer-reviewed scientific papers you already cite have photos and videos, that will address my point here fully.

- Line 116: WIMPs have NOT yet "failed" as there are still untested "natural" models above the neutrino fog. The problem is not the decades of failed searches, it is the lack of federal funding to build large enough (multi-tonne-scale) detectors in one go in the 1990s and early 2000s, forcing experimenters to be piecemeal even if they had been ready to go bigger faster, to search for extremely low cross sections. What has failed is the WIMP miracle (weak scale motivation) so I would soften this statement please. I agree with the author's frustration with a lack of new discoveries, in particle physics in general, since 2012 and the Higgs (top quark before that), but this can stated more diplomatically, especially since decades of axion searches have also found -nothing-.

- This is partly addressed here and there, but I am still concerned that antimatter is such a huge part of the explanation --- why is there not more damage observed because of violent annihilation, with antimatter running around in large quantities (compared to what is currently known at least) in the Earth's atmosphere, at least during thunderstorms?? (Why doesn’t antimatter annihilation destroy windows, for instance? Not enough positrons I imagine, but that is not stated clearly enough right now, numerically, anywhere that I could easily find/see.)

- Line 187: "...which we need in what follows..." is a contradiction, when you said no changes to the original AQN modeling were required, and everything would be "natural." I think your case is made later, and this is just poorly worded right here.

- Line 272: Slightly more serious comment in similar vein to one on 187. You say "qualitative" when you said earlier that you didn’t need to change any #s. Your earlier statements implied a quantitative analysis was happening. Are you saying the BL numbers are so broad that it was very easy to make AQNs fit? If so, that weakens your conclusions as probably being coincidences.

- What about alleged UAP hotspots? How would you explain them using AQN? Even more problematic: there are (unexplained) lightning hotspots in the world, e.g. a lake in Venezuela https://geology.com/records/lightning-hotspots/ Why do they not report more BL? 

* What follow are somewhat less significant comments (above ones are more serious)

• Equation 9: kappa is not defined, until much later
• Are AUGER and TA only seeing the high-velocity (high-B?) BL then?
• Equation 18 appears circular: how do you get L independently of BL observations but from the AQN model only instead?
• Line 384: You should be recommending to readers and experimentalists detectors of radiation in your text. You should be telling everyone to look for 511 keV lines to prove or disprove your work (e.g. in your Conclusions)
• Contradiction: you said there are temperatures of eV and keV but T cannot be defined because of lack of equilibrium. You may have been speaking about different spatial components of BL, potentially at different times. Be clearer.
• Line 402: why doesn’t BL visibly shrink over time then (from e+ annihilation)?
• Equation (22) truly total P or only visible light? The surrounding text is seemingly contradictory
• High-speed cameras exist. Can they not be used for size change in windows?
• Odors mentioned only once at beginning and once again at the end of the paper and never delved into at any depth. Ozone creation could be another explanation
• Lines 658 and 659: strange ae letter typo instead of Greek rho for the density (Latex glitch?)
• Line 698: 1% of what time? Not clear at all. (1% of the year there are T-storms?)
• Line 742: no physical evidence of UAP -> Wrong. Many claims of angel hair (see your own reference Knuth et al.), Delphos, KS "ring," alleged crash parts, etc. Many of these claims could not be verified because of stigma against topic - not the fault of the witnesses. Please reword this, as you're repeating a myth that there is no physical evidence when there most definitely is. There are so-called "trace" evidence UFO cases, very much physical: not just heating, burning, etc.
• Line 755: but wait, high velocities should mean would going into the ground but (many) UFOs appear to be able to hover, and they're anomalous because of that not high velocities always. So, this is another contradictory statement.
• Recommendation (Section 5.1): mention the Los Alamos green fireballs. They were "pseudo" meteorites. "La Paz insisted that the green fireballs could not be meteors because their trajectories were too flat, their color too green, and ... no meteoritic material had been recovered." (Knuth et al., and ref. therein on Los Alamos "fireballs" of the 1940s.) Could they have been AQN caused by extra ionization in the air from nuclear testing near the White Sands Missile Base? This could explain A LOT. Missed opportunity to strengthen your paper's claims. (See also works by Hastings and Salas on UAP and nuclear missile sites.)
• Where are the 511 keV and other annihilation lines (not just e+e- pairs but other types of pairs) from the universe? Could you explain anomalous 511 observations from the past couple decades with your paper? Is the issue the low density of outer space?
• Line 830: NOT inconsistent with the "laws of physics". Please soften phrasing, since the alleged observations were only inconsistent with Newtonian propulsion. Humans have not yet mastered GR-based (metric) engineering. Space-time warping would explain a lot of the stories, or even something as simple as purposeful plasma ionization of the air for supersonic travel (much less exotic). Also, there ARE measurements, even if not as good as for BL. There are radar returns going back to the 1950s (Oberth) showing thousands of gs of acceleration, there are magnetometer readings, luminosity measurements, and much more, unpublishable scientifically due to taboo.
• Nimitz case: You don't explain the "little legs" poking out of the bottom that looked like antennae on a physical craft or the tic-tac-like shape (not spherical), nor the movement to the CAP point, which seemed to indicate intelligence. This is a very weak case and probably should be in an appendix, removed, or in another paper entirely, focused on UFO stories specifically, for another journal at another time.
• Line 851: this does not match your earlier MFP estimates in the cm ranges (visible sizes of BLs). Explain better why not in the text. Not obvious to me
• Line 865 (and elsewhere) What about the GAIA measurements of local DM density, showing deviations from 0.3 GeV/cm^3? How are your results affected? Why don't we observe (more) BL-like/AQN events (remotely) near pockets of higher DM density, as mapped out by GAIA? (Or, do we, and they manifest as "anomalies" in astro observations??)
• Why do the appendices start with G instead of with A? (Where are A-F?)

Lastly, a few optional suggestions that are made as friendly suggestions to make the conclusions more robust. (Despite some of my harsh criticisms above, I would like to see the paper fixed and published in Universe.)

* If you want to keep the UAP material, it would be strengthened if you could explain USOs (water UFOs) by calculating the BL interaction with water (What happens when AQNs hit the ocean?)

* Can you explain the exotic radio waves recently seen in Antarctica? (https://www.iflscience.com/anomalous-radio-pulses-detected-in-antarctica-are-coming-from-underneath-the-ice-79619) Wrong frequencies? 

* Do the claims of a 3.5 keV axion line strengthen your publication?

* Anything of relevance here https://www.mdpi.com/journal/universe/special_issues/6AP842R2YC for your solar claims?

* Bright visible light from BLs connected to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0376042125000247 ? Can you do the math to compare with Vallee's work?

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The English is unfortunately not very good, and this detracts from the good scientific content of the manuscript. There are missing articles (the, a) extra articles and also very strange constructions like "no any" (multiple places). I'm sure this is not the author's fault if English is not their first language, but there are quite literally many dozens of mistakes in the English I saw that I did not have the time to list in my report. So, a lot of editing by the editorial staff will be necessary.

Author Response

see attached files

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The author adequately addressed my main concerns. We still disagree on the wisdom of including section 6.2, not because its arguments are wrong but because those arguments are not necessary. They are included to bolster the author's contention that AQNs are consistent with a variety of puzzling phenomena and with the same parameters that are consistent with this paper's treatment of ball lightning. The paper states this contention more than once, so I do not think that section is necessary and I think inclusion of this section opens the author to potential criticism that it is included to allow him to reference his own work. Therefore, I do not think it is in his interest to include it. He disagrees. If he wants to accept that risk, I will not preclude his doing so. Therefore, I do not object to the publication of the paper without another review.

The links in the references need to be improved. Many links are missing and those that are included link inappropriately to https://xxx.lanl.gov. In addition, the Appendices are still labeled G and H, which the author attributes to the Template. Both of these are editorial matters; I do not need to review the paper again.

 

Author Response

 Thank you for your comments. I wish to keep section 6.2 as I believe it strengthen the claim of this manuscript. 

MDPI  style redirect arxiv preprints to obsolete lanl.gov This is the source of the problems with arxiv refs. It should be resolved by the IT personal.  

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for your very hard work the past couple of months in addressing all of my many in-depth criticisms. I believe that this very interesting paper deserves to be published in MDPI Universe. It is unfortunate you had to remove the UAP section, as I believe I had relevant suggestions on that front, but perhaps you can write a second paper. (I have only one remaining comment: I believe you confused by Q13 with my Q24, and thus you didn't answer Q13, but it's a minor issue so it's ok. I was suggesting that you can recommend more ground-based 511 keV searches even amongst "citizen scientists," during thunderstorms; only in Q24 was I speaking about space-based.)

Author Response

 Thank you for your comments. Yes, I confused questions Q13 and Q24. Yes, people recorded 511 keV line during some thunderstorms. However, it was attributed to some other processes. I agree, much more experimental searches are required to discriminate possible sources for 511 keV line.