Ball Lightning

by Liu Cixin

Think only of planting, not reaping, and as you concentrate, an entire lifetime will pass before you know it. That’s what people mean by settling down. Or do the opposite, and make earning money your only goal. Spend all of your time thinking about how to make money, not about what you’ll do with it when you make it, until you’re on your deathbed clutching a pile of gold coins like Monsieur Grandet, saying: ‘It warms me…’ The key to a wonderful life is a fascination with something.

Society was plagued by stoicism in the face of the profound mysteries of the natural world: its existence was the bane of science. If science had less of that sort of person, who knows, maybe humanity would have reached Alpha Centauri by now!

“People like him are suited only to the sort of work that will be done entirely by machines in the future. Creativity and imagination have no meaning for them, and they employ rigor and discipline in their scholarship to cover up their mediocrity.

Einstein once said that every tree outside, every flower attracting pollinating bees, escapes all book knowledge.

It gave me a funny feeling that the first woman I felt something for talked so calmly of bloodshed and death like other women her age talked of makeup. But who could say for certain whether this was an indispensable part of what had attracted me to her?

“Take stars. If they didn’t exist, it’d be very easy to prove that their existence is impossible.”

You, however, are despondent. You’re like Scott reaching the South Pole at last, only to see the Norwegian flag that Amundsen left behind.

he came up with a theory inspired by Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The protagonist of that book prepared a drug that could split a person’s personality, but when he made a second batch, the drug was ineffective. He assumed that the new ingredients he had bought were impure, but later he found out that the ingredients in his successful batch had been impure, and it was those impurities that made it a success.

The lighthouse is always there, but you only see it when it’s lit.

The direction of a man or woman’s life might be determined by the era they found themselves in. It’s impossible for someone to distance themselves very far from the times they live in.

Sometimes you fly all the way only to discover it would have been better to have fallen halfway.

Sometimes what we find hardest to tolerate in others is our own reflection.

That last one was a strange color, a peculiar violet, and it remained the longest—around six minutes, letting Zhang Bin and me savor the feeling of fantasy turned reality.

When the aviators talked about ball lightning, they called it a “thunderball,” perhaps taking inspiration from the James Bond film of that name.

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.

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

Not long after the birth of the ball lightning weapon,

So they make the weapon

As a matter of fact, practically all of the major scientific advances of the past century, in aerospace, nuclear energy, computers, and on and on, were the product of cooperation between scientists and soldiers following different paths.

too. All the people who have been killed by ball lightning exist in a quantum state. Strictly speaking, they haven’t really died. They’re like Schrödinger’s cat, and exist indeterminately in two states, living and dead.”

“Swords can be made into plowshares,” Ross said. But then in a much lower voice, he added, “But some plowshares can be cast back into swords. Weapons researchers like us sometimes have to accept blame and loss for this in the course of carrying out our duties.…

“Xiao Yun, don’t let your fascination with weapons develop into superstition. Your thinking about war needs to be deeper, more holistic. The notion that the entire war can be won by relying on one or two new-concept weapons is, frankly, naïve.

Lin Yun murmured a Frost poem: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both … I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

“It’s not a crystalline snake or a hanging-proof rope,” Lin Yun answered. “It reminds me of Shiva, the eternally dancing god of Hinduism. When her dance stops, the world will be destroyed with a bang.” “Brilliant! You seem to have found a sensitivity for abstract beauty.”

“There’s one thing I’ve been pondering ever since I first posited the existence of the macro-quantum state: a sentient quantum individual is different from an ordinary non-sentient quantum particle in one important way, and we overlooked an important parameter for the wave function describing the former. Specifically, we overlooked an observer.”

That same year, I read two books by the British writer Arthur C. Clarke, 2001 and Rendezvous with Rama. The translation of those two books into Chinese marked the introduction of modern western science fiction to mainland China; previously, the country’s exposure to western science fiction had been limited to the work of Verne and Wells.

Dr. Chen, remarks, “If you are really able to prove that a super-observer is watching our world, then human activity becomes very indiscreet.… You could say human society is in a quantum state, and a super-observer will force it to collapse to a state of reason again.” However, society’s reaction is the exact opposite of what Chen predicts, because the super-observer is far more sinister than even humanity: unlike ball lightning, which coexists with the human world, the alien super-observer will overturn human society and push Earth civilization to the brink of extinction.