Don't be sorry, you've posted some good stuff!
The most potential I've worked with is about 40KV - didn't have many fancy
toys but I set a lot of pencils on fire with it. I can tell you it hurts
getting bit by it.
Had a decent vacuum pump we used to boil cold water and refrigerate apple
slices.
Scout

"Parallax" wrote in message
om...
"Scout" wrote in message
...
or a Monty Python Question
Scout

"Parallax" wrote
6. What is your favorite colour?
Is this a QM question?

Sorry 'bout the dissertation, ya jes happed to hit on some of my grad
school work. Ball lightning and even the propogation of lightning
like discharges are proof that you do not need billion dollar (or even
million dollar, or even 100,000$)facilities to do real science. My
grad school work had no funding cuz my prof retired so I wandered the
halls of the nucular bldg scrounging old vacuum chambers, pumps, and
ancient HV power supplies. Got wrote up by the safety folks so many
times for exposed wiring that I finally piled dead equipment in front
of my lab door to make it look abandoned, damn it was fun.
B'leve it or not, the propogation of sparks is not well understood in
many cases. For lightning, the E field is well below that required to
produce breakdowna head of the discharge. Theories include UV
(produced in the spark) causing ionization ahead of it, QM tunnelling
of electrons out of the streamer into the air ahead, etc. Making big
sparks was a lot of fun and discharges in various gasses was really
cool. I still have some Lichtenburg Figures in plexiglas (sort of
like a frozen spark in clear plexi)that are amazing fractal
structures, even when viewed under a microscope.
Lightning scares the crap outa me but it sure is cool.