Ball Lightning

by Liu Cixin

An astronomer once made an interesting observation: “Take stars. If they didn’t exist, it’d be very easy to prove that their existence is impossible.”

It was a city with a sense of nostalgia, something you didn’t get from ancient cities and their thousand-odd years of history. They were too old, old enough to have no connection to you, old enough that you lost all feeling. But young cities like these made you think about the era that had just passed away, the childhood and youth you spent there, your own antiquity, your own prehistory.

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

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,”

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.

“In the natural world, the unusual is just another manifestation of the normal.”

All the forces of the natural world, including those that people believe are the most gentle and harmless, can be turned into weapons to destroy life.

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.