Ball Lightning

by Cixin Liu

  The helicopters slowly flew farther out, and the arc turned into a sparkle against the blue sky. What happened next we only heard about later on.

  *

  Around twenty-four minutes into the flight, ball lightning was excited. The arc went out, and the feeler-equipped helicopter approached the thunderball to a distance of roughly twenty-five meters, then aligned the feeler. This was the first time a helicopter had been so close to the thunderball since the first one was excited. Tracking flight was difficult, because the thunderball was unaffected by air movement and no one knew what determined the path of its drift, which was volatile and random-seeming. Most dangerously, it might suddenly approach the helicopter. From recordings after the incident we discovered that the helicopter had drawn as close as sixteen meters to the thunderball. It was an ordinary thunderball that glowed orange yellow, and was inconspicuous in the daylight. It remained excited for one minute and thirty-five seconds before it disappeared, at a point 22.5 meters from the helicopter, with an explosion that Lin Yun and Captain Liu could hear clearly from inside. The feeler system triggered, and the twenty-odd-meter pole brought the tip of the superconducting lead to the precise point of disappearance. The recording showed that the time from the thunderball’s disappearance to the arrival of the lead was just 0.4 seconds.

  That was immediately followed by a loud noise next to Lin Yun, as if something on the aircraft had exploded. The cabin quickly filled with scalding steam. But the helicopter maintained a normal flight attitude all the way back.

  The helicopter landed amid cheers. Like Colonel Xu had said, in this experiment, a safe return was a victory.

  Upon inspection, it was a bottle of spring water left under the seat by one of the ground crew that had exploded. The thunderball had released its energy into the water, turning it instantly to steam. Fortunately, since it was under the seat and ruptured without fragmenting, the only injury was a light burn to Lin Yun’s right calf where the steam had penetrated her combat uniform.

  “We’re lucky the helicopter is oil-cooled. If it had a water tank like in a car, it would have turned into a bomb,” Captain Liu said with a shudder.

  “You’re overlooking another, even bigger way you were lucky,” Ding Yi said, coming over with a mysterious smile, as if none of this had anything to do with him. “You’re forgetting that there was water on the helicopter apart from that bottle.”

  “Where?” Lin Yun asked, but then answered immediately, “My God! Inside of us!”

  “Yes. Your blood, too.”

  We all took a chilly breath. The prospect of all the blood in their bodies turning to steam in the blink of an eye was too much to imagine.

  “That means that when ball lightning selects a target to release its energy, the target’s boundary conditions are very important,” Ding Yi said thoughtfully.

  Someone said, “Professor Ding, you ought to be thinking about thunderballs that have already released their energy. What were they called? Bubbles? There ought to be one in the battery.”

  Ding Yi nodded. “The capture process was carried out with high precision. It ought to be in there.”

  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 have 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.”