Ball Lightning Sneak Peek

by Liu Cixin

  We all grew excited, and began to take the superconducting battery off the helicopter. There was more than a bit of irony in this excitement, since most people had already guessed what the outcome would be. The proceedings were a relaxing comedy to celebrate the helicopters’ safe return.

  “Professor, when can you bring out the bubble and give us all a look?” someone asked after the heavy battery was finally out. We all expected that Ding Yi would secrete the battery in the lab so that as few people as possible would witness his failure, but his answer caught us by surprise: “Right away.”

  Cheers sounded in the crowd, like we were a group of deviant onlookers awaiting a beheading.

  Colonel Xu took a step up the ladder of one of the helicopters, and said loudly, “Listen up. Extracting the bubble from the battery requires care and full preparation. The battery will now be taken to Lab 3 and we will inform you of the results presently.”

  “Colonel, everyone’s put in so much effort, particularly Captain Liu and Major Lin, who risked their lives. I think they have the right to be compensated,” Ding Yi said, to another chorus of cheers.

  “Professor Ding, this is a significant experimental project, not a children’s game. I order the battery to be returned to the lab immediately,” Colonel Xu said firmly. I sensed his kindness, and knew he was doing his best to preserve Ding Yi’s dignity.

  “Colonel, don’t forget that the bubble extraction portion of the experiment should be my sole responsibility. I have the right to decide what steps to take for this experiment and when to take them!” Ding Yi said to Colonel Xu.

  “Professor, I suggest you calm down,” the colonel said to him quietly.

  “And what’s Major Lin’s opinion?” Ding Yi asked the silent Lin Yun.

  With a toss of her hair, she said decisively, “Do it now. Whatever it is, it’s better that we face it sooner rather than later.”

  “Precisely.” Ding Yi waved his hand. “Next, I’d ask the engineers from the superconductivity department to come forward.”

  The three engineers in charge of operating the superconducting battery pushed forward, and Ding Yi said to them, “I’m sure you’re quite clear on the extraction procedure we discussed yesterday. Have you brought the magnetic retaining field assembly?” Receiving an affirmative answer, he said, “Then let’s begin.”

  The cylindrical battery was situated on a workbench. One engineer strung a superconducting lead, with a switch attached, to the cathode. Ding Yi pointed at it. “When that switch is pressed, the lead will be connected to the battery, and the bubble within it will be released.”

  At the other end of the lead, two engineers set up a device composed of several spools of wire set at equal distances. Ding Yi said to the crowd, “When the bubble is released, no vessel will be able to contain it. It can pass through all matter and move of its own accord. But the theory predicts that the bubble will bear a negative charge, so it can be constrained by a magnetic field. This device produces a containment field to hold the bubble in place for you to observe. Good. Now turn on the field.”

  An engineer flipped a switch and a small red light on the field device came on.

  Ding Yi took out a square object from behind him. “I brought this along so you’ll be better able to see the bubble.” To our great surprise, it was a Go board.

  “Next, let’s welcome this historic moment.” Ding Yi went over to the superconducting battery and placed a finger on the red switch. With everyone’s attention focused on him, he pressed it.

  Nothing happened.

  Ding Yi’s expression remained dead calm as he pointed at the space within the field generator and declared solemnly, “This is ball lightning in an unexcited state.”

  There was nothing there.

  For a moment there was silence, other than the faint hum of the field generator. Time passed sluggishly like sticky paste, and I ached for it to flow faster.

  A sudden burst behind us made us jump, and we turned around to see Captain Liu doubled over. He’d taken a drink of water, but couldn’t hold back his laughter, and had sprayed it out.

  Through his laughter he said, “Look at Professor Ding! He’s basically that tailor from ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’!”

  It was an apt analogy, and we burst out laughing at the humor and sheer audacity of the physicist.

  “Simmer down and listen up!” Colonel Xu said, waving his hand to suppress the laughter. “We ought to have a proper understanding and attitude toward the entire experiment. We knew that it would fail, but we arrived at the common understanding that a safe return of the experimental personnel would be a victory. Now that outcome has been satisfied.”

  “But someone’s got to be responsible for the outcome!” someone shouted. “More than a million yuan has been put into it, and a helicopter and two lives were gambled on it. Is this farce all that we get in return?” The remark drew immediate rejoinders from the crowd.

  Then Ding Yi raised up the Go board to a level higher than the generated magnetic field. His movement caught people’s attention, and the hooting quickly died down. When there was complete calm, Ding Yi eased the board downward until the bottom made contact with the generator.

  People drew closer to look at the board, and what they saw turned them as still as statues.

  Some of the squares on the board were deformed. There was a clear curve to their edges, as if the board had been placed behind an almost perfectly transparent crystal ball.

  Ding Yi removed the board, and everyone bent down to peer straight on at the space. Even without the aid of the board, the bubble was visible, a faint circular outline vaguely described in the air, like a soap bubble lacking all markings.

  Captain Liu was the first of the frozen crowd to move. He extended a trembling, fingernail-less hand to touch the bubble, but pulled it back in the end without making contact.

  “Don’t worry,” Ding Yi said. “Even if you stuck your head in, it wouldn’t matter.”

  And so the captain really did stick his head into the bubble. This was the first time that a human had looked at the outside world from within ball lightning, but Captain Liu saw nothing unusual. What he saw was a crowd cheering once again—only this time, their cheers were genuine.

  MACRO-ELECTRONS

  The base was close to the Kangxi Grasslands northwest of the city. To celebrate the experiment’s success, we took a trip to have roast whole mutton. Dinner was outdoors on the edge of that fairly small grassland.

  Colonel Xu gave a small speech: “In olden days, there must have been a day when someone had a stroke of inspiration and understood that they were surrounded by air. Later, people learned that they were constrained by gravity, and that their surroundings were an ocean of electromagnetic waves, and that cosmic radiation passes through our bodies at all times.… Now we know something else: that bubbles are there around us, floating nearby in space that appears empty. Now, let me speak for us all, and offer Professor Ding and Major Lin my well-deserved admiration.”

  Again, everyone cheered.

  Ding Yi went over to Lin Yun, raised up a large saucer (he was a boozer as well as a smoker), and said, “Major, I used to have a prejudice against soldiers. I thought you were the epitome of mechanical thinking. But you have changed my ideas.”

  Lin Yun looked at him wordlessly. I had never seen that expression in her eyes before toward anyone—not even, I’m willing to believe, Jiang Xingchen.

  And then I realized that in the midst of all of the uniforms, Ding Yi stood out. In the hot summer wind on the grassland, he seemed formed of three flags: one, his wind-tossed long hair, and the two others his large sleeveless T-shirt and shorts that whipped constantly about his thin stalk of a body, like flags hung on a flagpole. Next to him, Lin Yun cut a lovely figure in the evening light.

  Colonel Xu said, “Now you all must be brimming with anticipation for Professor Ding to tell us just what ball lightning is.”

  Ding Yi nodded. “I know that lots of people ha
ve poured immense effort into unlocking the secret of nature, including the likes of Dr. Chen and Major Lin. They devoted their life’s energies to taking the EM and fluid equations and twisting them to mind-shattering degrees, until they nearly broke. Then they put in one patch after another to plug the holes, adding extra struts to support the teetering edifice, ultimately coming up with something far too huge and complicated, and incomparably ugly.… Dr. Chen, do you know where you failed? It wasn’t that you weren’t complex enough. It was that you didn’t think simply.”

  It was the same thing I’d heard from Lin Yun’s father. Two uncommon men in two different fields had come up with the same profound observation.

  “How simple could it be?” I asked, mystified.

  Ding Yi disregarded my question and went on: “Next, I will tell you what ball lightning is.”

  At this moment, the few scattered stars that had begun to appear in the heavens seemed to stop their twinkling, as if listening for God’s last judgment.

  “It is nothing more than an electron.”

  We looked at each other, each of us trying to wrap our minds around this. Eventually we focused our attention back on Ding Yi. His answer was so weird that we lacked the ability to take it any further.

  “An electron the size of a soccer ball,” he added.

  “An electron the … What makes it like that?” someone stammered.

  “What do you think an electron ought to be like? An opaque, dense little ball? Yes, that’s the picture of an electron, proton, or neutron in most people’s minds. First I’ll tell you about the picture of the universe painted by modern physics: the geometry of the universe is not physical.”

  “Can you be a little less abstract?”

  “What if I put it this way: in the universe, apart from empty space, there is nothing.”

  Again we lapsed into silence and contemplated what our minds couldn’t grasp. Captain Liu was the first to speak. He waved half a lamb leg in the air and said, “What do you mean, nothing? It’s all empty space? This roast whole mutton is totally tangible. Are you telling me that I’ve just eaten emptiness?”

  “Yes. All of what you’ve eaten is empty space, as are you, since you and the mutton are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, particles that, on a microscopic level, are curved space.” He cleared aside a few plates and drew on the tablecloth with a finger. “Suppose that space is this cloth. Atomic particles are the minute wrinkles in it.”

  “That’s something we can understand a bit better,” Captain Liu said thoughtfully.

  “It’s still quite different from our conventional picture of the world,” Lin Yun said.

  “But it’s the picture that’s closest to reality,” Ding Yi said.

  “So you mean that electrons are like bubbles?”

  “Closed curved space,” Ding Yi agreed, nodding gravely.

  “But an electron … how is it so big?”

  “In the briefest period after the Big Bang, all of space was flat. Later, as energy levels subsided, wrinkles appeared in space, which gave birth to all of the fundamental particles. What’s been so mystifying for us is why the wrinkles should only appear at the microscopic level. Are there really no macroscopic wrinkles? Or, in other words, are there no macroscopic fundamental particles? Now we know there are.”

  My first thought at this point was that I could breathe at last. My mind had been asphyxiating for more than a decade, and all that time it felt like I’d been immersed in water that was murky at every turn. Now I had burst to the surface, and I took my first breath of air, and saw the vast sky. A blind man probably has the same feeling on regaining his sight.

  “We’re able to see the bubbles because the curved space bends the light that passes through, forming visible edges,” Ding Yi went on.

  “But what makes you believe they’re electrons, and not protons or neutrons?” Colonel Xu asked.

  “Good question. But the answer is quite simple: throughout the process of being excited by lightning, turning to ball lightning, and then returning to bubbles, the bubbles are actually electrons being excited from a low potential to high potential state, and then returning back to a low potential state. Of those three particles, only electrons can be excited in this way.”

  “And because it’s an electron, it can be conducted through superconducting leads, and run ceaselessly through a superconducting battery, like a loop current,” Lin Yun said, as understanding dawned.

  “What’s weird, though, is that its diameter is about the same as that battery.”

  “With macro-electrons, the wave form is dominant in the wave-particle duality, so the significance of its size is completely different from what we generally expect. They also have some pretty unbelievable characteristics, which we’ll gradually observe, and which I believe will change everyone’s view of the world. But right now, we need to choose a name for these large electrons. They’re electrons on a macroscopic scale, so let’s call them macro-electrons.”

  “Then do macro-protons and macro-neutrons also exist?”

  “They ought to. But since they can’t be excited, we’ll have a hard time finding them.”

  “Professor Ding, your dream has become reality,” Lin Yun said, but apart from Ding Yi and me, no one really understood the meaning of her words.

  “Yes, yes. There really are watermelon-sized fundamental particles lying on the table of physics. Our next step must be to study their internal structure—a structure formed from curved space. It will be difficult. But innumerable times easier, I believe, than studying the structure of microscopic particles.”

  “Then, are there macro-atoms too? The three macro-particles ought to be able to combine into atoms!”

  “Yes, there ought to be macro-atoms.”

  “The bubble—I mean, the macro-electron—that we caught: is it a free electron, or does it belong to a macro-atom? And if so, where’s its nucleus?”

  Ding Yi chuckled. “You’ve got me there. But there’s an immense amount of space in an atom. If a macro-atom is the size of a theater hall, the nucleus would be about the size of a walnut. So if this macro-electron does belong to a macro-atom, then the nucleus would be quite far from here.”

  “My God. One more question: If there are macro-atoms, then is there macro-matter, and a macro-world?”

  “Now we’re into grand questions of philosophy,” Ding Yi said to the questioner with a smile.

  “So is there or isn’t there a macro-world?” the questioner followed. We were like a group of children in the thrall of a story.

  “I believe there’s a macro-world. Or a macro-universe. But what it’s like is an unknown unknown. Maybe it’s completely different from our own world. Maybe it corresponds exactly, like the posited matter and antimatter universes, and there’s a macro-Earth with a macro-you and -me. In that case, my brain in the macro-world would be large enough to contain our universe’s entire solar system.… It’s a parallel universe, in a way.”

  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 progr
ess 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.