Ball Lightning

by Cixin Liu

  Night had fallen, and we looked up at the glittering summer sky, each of us straining our eyes into the vast star field, hoping to find, somewhere in the cosmic downy empty depths of the Milky Way, the enormous outlines of Ding Yi’s brain. That macro-atom-made ultra-head was, in my mind, crystal clear. We were amazed that our thoughts had turned so profound all of a sudden.

  *

  After the dinner ended, we strolled tipsily on the grassland. I saw Ding Yi and Lin Yun close together, talking intimately. Ding Yi’s three flags looked dashing in the night breeze, and I knew that this thin beanstalk of a guy would easily defeat the full-on masculine appeal of the carrier captain. This was the power of the mind. For whatever reason, my heart was filled with an inexpressible bitterness.

  The stars in the heavens were as brilliant as they were on Mount Tai. In the night of the grassland, countless ghostly macro-electrons were drifting by.

  Weapons

  From the first successful capture of a bubble, research blazed a new trail, and forward progress smoothed out as results came in one after another. It was a little like riding a roller coaster. Once I proposed the excitement hypothesis for ball lightning, and Ding Yi used theory to describe the existence of macro-electrons, Lin Yun’s technical genius began to play a critical role.

  The next step in the research was naturally to collect macro-electrons. Ding Yi did not need many for his theoretical research, but the base required an enormous number for weapons research. This initially seemed like a difficult task, since the conventional electric arc collection method was highly dangerous and could hardly be used again.

  People dreamed up all kinds of solutions, but the one that received the most support was remote aircraft. Although this would solve the safety problem, it would be costly and highly inefficient to use it to collect the huge number of macro-electrons needed.

  Instead, Lin Yun considered detecting unexcited macro-electrons directly, believing that if they were visible to the naked eye up close, they ought to be detectable by highly sensitive optics from farther away. She designed an atmospheric optical detection system that could detect transparent objects that refracted light over a vast range of space. The system used two lasers perpendicular to each other to scan the atmosphere, while on the ground there was a highly sensitive image capture and recognition system that turned the refractions of the lasers in the atmosphere into a 3-D image, similar to how a CT scanner works.

  For a while, the base was crawling with non-uniformed personnel: software engineers, optics specialists, pattern-recognition experts, and even a telescope maker.

  When the system was complete, rather than macro-electrons, the screen displayed atmospheric turbulence and gas streams, movement that was ordinarily invisible, but was clear as day to the sensitive system. The atmosphere typically appeared as calm as still water, when in actuality it was astonishingly agitated, like water sloshing in a gigantic washing machine. I realized that the system would be quite useful in meteorology, but since our focus was on detecting macro-electrons, I didn’t put much thought in that direction. The macro-electrons showed up amid the complicated airflow disturbances, but since they had a round shape, the pattern-recognition software could easily pick them out of the chaos. And so a large number of macro-electrons were located in the air.

  Collection was far easier once we began locating them this way, since, unexcited, they posed no danger. The feeler was no longer necessary, and was replaced by a net formed out of superconducting wires, and we switched to capturing macro-electrons by blimp to save money. Sometimes multiple macro-electrons were collected at once, like trawling for fish in the sky.

  Now it was far easier to capture ball lightning and turn it into a human collectible. Looking back on humanity’s arduous process of studying it, the people like Zhang Bin who spent a lifetime on it without anything to show for it, and the grand tragedy of Base 3141 in the Siberian forest, we felt the heartache of knowing that we had taken such a long and winding road that had ended up being an enormous detour.

  Colonel Xu said, “That’s what scientific research is. Every step you’ve taken, no matter how absurd, is a necessary one.”

  He said this while sending off the helicopter group. After we began using blimps to capture the macro-electrons, the base no longer had any use for helicopters. We bade farewell to the two aviators who had been with us through hardship and danger. Those endless nights of towing the blinding arc would become one of our lives’ most treasured memories and, we believed, part of scientific history.

  Before leaving, Captain Liu said to us, “Work hard! We’ll be waiting to install your thunderball machine gun!”

  The aviators had come up with another new term, which we actually used in the field of ball lightning weapons.

  *

  The success of optical detection of unexcited macro-electrons kindled our hopes for more progress, but turned out only to demonstrate the shallowness of our physics knowledge. After the system’s first success, Lin Yun and I made a beeline for Ding Yi.

  “Professor Ding, now we should be able to find the nuclei of macro-atoms!”

  “What gives you that impression?”

  “We haven’t been able to find them because macro-protons and macro-neutrons aren’t excitable like macro-electrons. But now we can locate bubbles directly by optical means.”

  Ding Yi laughed and shook his head, as if forgiving two school pupils for their error. “The primary reason we can’t find macro-atom nuclei isn’t because they aren’t excitable, but because we have no idea what they’re like.”

  “What? They’re not bubbles?”

  “Who told you they were bubbles? The theory postulates that their shape is completely different from macro-electrons, as different as ice and fire.”

  I had a hard time imagining that other forms of macro-particles could be floating around us. It lent an eerie feeling to the surrounding space.

  Now we were able to excite ball lightning in the lab. The excitement apparatus started off with a bubble contained inside a superconducting battery. When it was released, it was accelerated in a magnetic field, and then passed through ten separate lightning generators. The total power of the lightning produced by these generators was far greater than that of the arc that excited airborne thunderballs. The amount of lightning to produce was determined by the needs of the experiment.

  As for weapons production, what we now needed to know was how to make use of the high target selectivity of the macro-electron’s energy release, the most perplexing, terrifying, and devilish aspect of ball lightning.

  Ding Yi said, “It concerns the wave-particle duality of macro-particles. I’ve established a theoretical energy-release model, and have designed an observation experiment that will show you something truly unbelievable. It’s a simple experiment: observe the thunderball’s energy release slowed down by a factor of 1.5 million.”

  “1.5 million?”

  “That’s right. It’s a crude estimate based on the smallest-volume macro-electron we currently have stored. That’s roughly the factor.”

  “But that’s... 36 million frames per second! Where are we going to find recording equipment that’s that fast?” someone asked.

  “That’s not my concern,” Ding Yi said, as he lit the pipe he hadn’t touched for some time in a leisurely fashion.

  “I’m sure the equipment must exist!” Lin Yun said firmly. “We’ll find it.”

  *

  When Lin Yun and I entered the laboratory building of the State Defense Optics Institute, our attention was immediately captured by a large photograph in the lobby: a hand holding a gun whose massive barrel was aimed directly at the photographer; red flame light inside the barrel and tendrils of smoke just beginning to issue from it. The most eye-catching focal point of the photo was a ball suspended in front of the gun, coppery and smooth: the bullet that had just been fired.

  “This is a high-speed photo taken during the Institute’s early days. It has a temporal re
solution of roughly one ten-thousandth of a second. Using today’s standards, it’s just ordinary fast photography, not high-speed photography. You can find that standard of equipment at any specialty camera store,” a director at the Institute said.

  “So who was the martyr who snapped the picture?” Lin Yun asked.

  The director laughed. “A mirror. The photo was taken using a reflected light system.”

  The Institute had convened a small meeting with several engineers. When Lin Yun put forward our request, that we needed ultra-high-speed camera equipment, several of them grimaced.

  The director said, “Our ultra-high-speed equipment is still a ways away from international levels. It’s highly unstable in actual operation.”

  “Give us an idea of the numbers you require, and we’ll see what we can do,” an engineer said.

  Shakily, I told them our number: “We need to take around 36 million frames per second.”

  I had imagined they would shake their heads, but to my surprise they burst out laughing. The director said, “After all of that, and what you’re looking for is just an ordinary high-speed camera! Your notion of ultra-high-speed photography is stuck in the fifties. We’re up to as much as four hundred million frames per second now. The top standards at the world level are around six hundred million.”

  After we’d relaxed a bit, the director led us on a tour of the Institute. He pointed to a display and said, “What does this look like to you?”

  We looked at it a while, and Lin Yun said, “It looks like a slowly blooming flower. But it’s strange—the petals are glowing.”

  The director said, “That’s what makes high-speed photography the gentlest of photography. It can turn the most violent of processes gentle and light. What you see is an armor-piercing shell exploding as it strikes its target.” He pointed to a bright yellow stamen in the flower, and said, “See, this ultra-high temperature, ultra-high-speed jet is piercing the armor. This was taken at a rate of around six million frames per second.”

  As we neared Lab 2, the director said, “What you’ll see next ought to satisfy your high-speed photography requirements. It shoots at fifty million frames per second.”

  In this photo, we seemed to be looking at a still water surface. A small, invisible stone had landed on the surface, kicking up a bubble, which fractured, sending liquid particles in all directions as waves spread out in rings on the surface....

  “This is a high-energy laser striking a metal surface.”

  Lin Yun asked inquisitively, “Then what can you film with a hundred million frames per second ultra-high-speed camera?”

  “Those images are classified, so I can’t show them to you. But I can tell you that the cameras often record the controlled nuclear fusion process in a tokamak accelerator.”

  *

  High-speed imaging of thunderball energy release progressed quickly. Macro-electrons were passed through all ten lightning stages and were excited to very high energy states, with energy levels far higher than any ball lightning ever excited in nature, allowing their energy release process to be somewhat more noticeable. The excited thunderballs entered the target area, which had targets of various shapes and compositions: wooden cubes, plastic cones, metal balls, cardboard boxes filled with shavings, glass cylinders, and so on. They were distributed on the ground or on cement platforms of varying height. Pure white paper was laid out under each, giving the whole target area the feel of an exhibition of modern sculpture. After a thunderball entered the target area, it was slowed by a magnetic damper, so it drifted about until it discharged or went out on its own. Three high-speed cameras were set up on the edges of the target area. They were massive and structurally complicated, and unless you knew what they were, you wouldn’t think they were cameras. Since there was no way of knowing beforehand which target the thunderball’s energy would strike, we had to rely on luck to capture the target.

  The test started. Since it was highly dangerous, all of the personnel exited the area. The whole test procedure was directed by remote control from an underground control room three hundred meters from the lab.

  The monitor showed the superconducting battery releasing the first bubble, which contacted the first arc. The monitoring system transmitted a distorted rushing sound, but the loud crack carried across the three hundred meters from the lab. The excited ball lightning moved slowly forward under the influence of the magnetic field, passing through nine more arcs as thunder rumbled ceaselessly from the lab. Every time the ball lightning contacted an arc, its energy levels doubled. Its brightness didn’t increase correspondingly, but its colors changed: from dark red, it turned orange, then yellow, then white, bright green, sky blue, and plum, until at last a violet fireball entered the acceleration area, where it was whipped by an acceleration field into a torrent. In the next instant, it entered the target area. Like plunging into still water, it slowed down, and began to drift among the targets. We held our breath and waited. Then, after a burst of energy and a flash of light, a tremendous noise came from the lab that shook the glass cases in the underground control room. The energy release had turned a plastic cone into a small pile of black ash on white paper. But the high-speed camera operators said that the cameras had not been trained on that target, and so nothing had been recorded. Another eight thunderballs were subsequently fired off. Five of them discharged, but none of them struck the targets the cameras were trained on. The last energy release struck a cement platform supporting a target, blowing it to bits and causing an immense mess in the target area, so the experiment had to be halted until the lab, which now smelled heavily of ozone, was set up again.

  Once the target area was reset, the tests continued. One macro-electron after another was fired at the target area to play a game of cat and mouse with the three high-speed cameras. The optics engineers worried about the safety of their cameras, since they were the equipment nearest to the target area, but we pressed on. It wasn’t until the eleventh discharge that we captured an image of a target being struck, a wooden cube thirty centimeters on a side. This was a wonderful example of a ball lightning discharge: the wooden cube was incinerated into ash that retained its original cubic form, only to collapse at a touch. When the ash was cleared, the paper beneath it was completely unaffected, with not even a burn mark.

  The raw high-speed image footage was being loaded into the computer, since if we were to play it back at normal speed, it would be more than a thousand hours long, of which only twenty seconds would show the target being struck. By the time we had extracted those twenty seconds, it was late at night. Holding our breath and staring at the screen, we pulled back the veil on that mysterious demon.

  At a normal twenty-four frames per second, the whole clip lasted twenty-two minutes. At the time of discharge, the thunderball was around 1.5 meters from the target; fortunately, both the thunderball and the target were in frame. For the first ten seconds, the thunderball’s brightness increased dramatically. We waited for the wooden cube to catch fire, but to our surprise, it lost all color and turned transparent, until it appeared only as a vague outline of a cube. When the thunderball had reached maximum brightness, the cube’s outlines had totally vanished. Then the thunderball’s brightness decreased, a process lasting five seconds, during which the position formerly occupied by the cube was completely empty! Then the outlines of the transparent cube began to take shape again, and soon it regained corporeality and color, only gray white—it was now a cube of ash. At this point, the thunderball was entirely extinguished.

  Dumb as wooden chickens, we took a few seconds to recover and think of replaying the video. We now went through it frame by frame, and when we reached the point where the wooden cube was a transparent outline, we paused the video.

  “It’s like a cubic bubble!” Lin Yun said, pointing at the outline.

  As we continued the playback, only the dimming thunderball and the empty white paper beneath it were visible on screen. We advanced the frames, staring at each of them for ag
es, but there really was nothing on the paper. Advancing further, the outlines returned, now surrounding a cube of ash....

  A cloud of smoke covered the screen. Ding Yi had lit his pipe at some point, and was exhaling at the screen.

  “You have just witnessed the dual nature of matter!” he said loudly, pointing at the screen. “In that brief moment, the bubble and the wooden cube both exhibited a wave nature. They experienced resonance, and in that resonance the two became one. The wooden cube received the energy released by the macro-electron, and then they both regained their particle nature, the burnt wooden cube coalescing into matter at its original position. This is the puzzle that has vexed you all, and the explanation for the target selectivity of the thunderball’s energy release. When the target is struck by the energy, it exhibits a wave state and is not at its original position at all. Thus the energy will naturally have no effect on the object’s surroundings.”

  “Why is it only the target object, the wooden cube here, that exhibits a wave nature, and not the paper beneath it?”

  “This is determined by the object’s boundary conditions, through a mechanism similar to how image processing software can automatically pick out a face from an image.”

  “There’s another puzzle that now has an explanation: ball lightning’s penetrative power!” Lin Yun said excitedly. “When macro-electrons exhibit wave nature, they can naturally penetrate matter. And if they encounter slits roughly their size, they will be diffracted.”

  “When ball lightning exhibits a wave state, it can cover a large range. So when a thunderball discharges, it can affect objects at a distance,” Colonel Xu said, as realization dawned.

  *

  And so the cloud of mystery surrounding ball lightning gradually dissipated. But these theory-based accomplishments did not have much direct application to the development of ball lightning weapons. As far as weapons development was concerned, a large quantity of lethal macro-electrons needed to be collected first, and theory was useless for that purpose. However, the base had captured and stored more than ten thousand macro-electrons already, and that number was swiftly growing, which gave us the liberty to use crude techniques that did not rely on any theory. We already knew that the target selected for energy discharge was determined by the nature of the macro-electron, and unrelated to the lightning that excited it. This was the basis upon which we chose our experiment.