Ball Lightning

by Liu Cixin

On a stormy night, you get a sense of how precious family really is. The warm embrace of home is intoxicating when you imagine the terrors of the outside world. You feel for those souls without a home, out there in the open, shivering through the storm and lightning. You want to open a window so they can fly in, but the outside world is so frightening that you cannot let even the tiniest breath of cold air enter the warmth inside.

there was no satisfactory theory for the principle of lightning formation in thunderclouds, and although every schoolchild knows that lightning rods protect against lightning, the underlying theory was not well understood. In recent years, precise calculations of the charge carried by the metal tip of a lightning rod showed that it was far too low to neutralize the charge that builds up in a thundercloud.

“We’re both mortal men. We may have put far more into the search than other people, but we’re still mortal. We can only make deductions within the framework defined by elemental theory, and dare not deviate from it, lest we step out into the airless void. But within this framework, we cannot deduce anything.”

“Take stars. If they didn’t exist, it’d be very easy to prove that their existence is impossible.” That applied to ball lightning, too. Conceptualizing a means by which electromagnetic waves traveling at the speed of light could be confined into such a small ball was maddening.

A world composed of atoms and molecules has evolved life, so if the Big Bang theory is correct, then in the long evolutionary history of the universe, the invisible electromagnetic world would have been in existence far longer than the world of atoms and molecules. Why wouldn’t it have evolved an electromagnetic structure akin to life?”

“I’ve finally tasted of the wine, and my life is complete!”

“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.”

“Lin Yun, the first time I met you on Mount Tai, I felt something I’d never felt before.…” I looked off at the distant mountains separating us from Beijing. “I know … but we’re too different.” She followed my gaze. We remained like that for a while, not looking at each other, but watching the same spot in the distance. “Yes. Too different … Take care.”

When she turned back to look at the macro-nucleus, finding it again took a lot of effort. It was hard to imagine that the dancing transparent string and the far-off crystalline bubble formed an atom with a radius of more than five hundred kilometers. How big would a macro-universe formed from those atoms be? The mere thought was enough to drive you crazy.

I never saw the blue rose again, but it was enough to know it was there. Sometimes in the still of the night I would move the amethyst vase to the window, then stand with my back to it. On these occasions, I could always smell that ethereal aroma, and I knew the rose was there. With my heart’s eye I could clearly see every detail, I could caress every petal, I could watch it sway slightly in the night breeze from the window.… It was a flower I could only see with my heart. But I still held out the hope of getting another glimpse of that blue rose in my lifetime. Ding Yi said that, from the perspective of quantum mechanics, death is the process of transitioning from a strong observer to a weak observer, and then to a non-observer. When I become a weak observer, the rose’s probability cloud will collapse to a destroyed state more slowly, giving me the hope of seeing it again. When I come to death’s door and open my eyes for the final time, all of my intellect and memories will be lost into the abyss of the past, and I will return to the pure feeling and fantasies of childhood. At that moment, I’m sure the quantum rose will smile at me.