Лю Цысинь - Ball Lightning

“I understand,” I said.

“According to eyewitnesses, who were quite far away, when the fireball contacted the terminal it vanished, and then traveled the length of the meter and emerged from the other terminal. She was unharmed at this point, but in the end she did not escape: the fireball revolved around her several times, and then exploded directly above her head. When the flash cleared, she was gone. All they found in the place she was last standing was this raincoat, spread untouched on the ground, and underneath it a pile of white ash, most of which was washed away by the rain in thin trickles of white…”

I looked at the raincoat, imagining it wrapped around that young, dedicated soul, and said softly, “Like the captain who dies at sea or the astronaut who dies in space, her death was worth it.”

Zhang Bin nodded. “I think so, too.”

“And the meter recording?”

“Also unharmed. And it was taken immediately to the lab to determine the residual magnetism.”

“How much?” I asked nervously. This was the first firsthand quantitative observational data in the history of ball lightning research.

“Zero.”

“What?”

“No residual magnetism whatsoever.”

“That means no current passed through the receptor conductor. So how was it conducted?”

Zhang Bin waved a hand. “There are too many mysteries about ball lightning that I won’t go into here. Compared to the others, this isn’t a big one. Now I’d like you to take a look at something even more incredible.” As he spoke, he pulled out a plastic-covered notebook from a pocket of the raincoat. “She had this in her raincoat pocket when she died.” He placed the notebook on a cardboard box with extreme care, as if it were a fragile object. “Use a light touch when you turn the pages.”

It was an ordinary notebook, with a picture of Tiananmen on the cover, blurry now from wear. I gently opened the cover and saw a line of graceful characters on the title page: The entrance to science is the entrance to hell.—Marx.

I looked at Zhang Bin, and he motioned for me to turn the page. I turned to page one, and realized why he told me to be gentle: this page was burned, partly turned to ash and lost. Very gently, I turned this burnt page, and the next one was completely intact, its dense data recordings easily visible, as if written yesterday.

“Turn another page,” he said.

The third leaf was burned.

The fourth was intact.

The fifth was burned.

The sixth was intact.

The seventh was burned.

The eighth was intact.

As I paged through the notebook, every other page was burned. Some of the burnt pages only had bits close to the binding remaining, but on the neighboring intact pages I could see no burn marks. I looked up and stared at Zhang Bin.

He said, “Can you believe it? I’ve never shown this to anyone else, since they’d certainly think it’s fake.”

Looking straight at him, I said, “No, Professor Zhang. I believe!”

Then I told a second person about my fateful birthday night.

After hearing my story, he said, “I guessed you had experience in this area, but I never imagined it would be so terrible. You ought to know, after all you personally witnessed, that the study of ball lightning is a foolish thing.”

“Why? I don’t understand.”

“I realized this fairly late myself. Over the past thirty years, apart from seeking ball lightning in naturally occurring thunderstorms, more of my energies were devoted to theoretical study. Thirty years.” He sighed. “I won’t describe that process to you. See for yourself.” He gestured at the large cardboard boxes surrounding us.

I opened two of the heavy ones and found they were filled to the top with stacks of calculation books! I pulled out two of them and read the dense differential equations and matrices, then looked around at the low wall of boxes, and sucked in a breath of cold air at the thought of the work he had done in thirty years.

I asked, “And experiments—what have you done?”

“Not much. Means were limited. There’s no way the project could get much funding. But more importantly, none of these mathematical models is worth testing. They were not well-founded, and when I got further along I’d find out that I’d taken a wrong first step. In other words, even coming up with a self-consistent mathematical model is still very far from being able to produce ball lightning in the lab.”

“Are you still carrying out research in this area?”

Zhang Bin shook his head. “I stopped a few years ago. Odd—it was the same year you first asked me questions about ball lightning. On New Year’s Eve, I was mired in hopeless calculations when I heard the bells ringing out the new year and the joyous cheers of the students. All of a sudden I realized that my life was practically over, and a sadness I had never known before came over me and I came here. Like so many times before, I took the notebook out of the raincoat, and as I carefully turned the pages, I realized a truth.”

“What?”

He picked up the notebook and held it before him. “Look at this, and think about the stormy night of your fourteenth birthday. Do you truly believe that all of this is contained within the existing laws of physics?”

I could say nothing in response.

“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.”

Listening to him, I felt the same frustration I had on the foggy mountain road on Mount Tai.

He went on: “In you, I saw another young man like myself, and did my utmost to stop you from going down that dangerous path, although I knew it was of no use. You’ll still take that path. I’ve done everything I can.” He finished, and sat wearily down on a cardboard box.

I said, “Professor Zhang, you’re being a bad judge of your own work. When you’re captivated by something, striving after it is enough. That’s a kind of success.”

“Thank you for your consolation,” he said weakly.

“I’m saying it for myself, too. When I get to your age, that’s how I’ll console myself.”

He gestured to the boxes. “Take these, and some discs too. Take a look if you’re interested. If you’re not, then forget about it. They’re all meaningless…. And this notebook—take it too. I get scared looking at it.”

“Thank you,” I said, a little choked up. I pointed at the photo on the wall. “Could I scan a copy of that?”

“Of course. What for?”

“Perhaps to one day let the world know that your wife was the first person to directly measure ball lightning.”

He carefully took the photo down from the wall and handed it to me. “Her name is Zheng Min. Peking University physics department, entering class of ’63.”

The next day, I moved the boxes from Zhang Bin’s house to my dormitory, as if it were a storage unit. Then I read the stuff day and night. Like an inexperienced climber, I had attempted a summit I supposed no one else had reached. But looking around me, I saw the tents of the people before me, and their footprints leading onward. By this point, I had read through the three mathematical models Zhang Bin had constructed, each superbly fashioned, one of which was along the same lines as my PhD thesis, but completed more than a decade before. What shamed me even more was that on the final pages of his manuscript, he pointed out the error of the model, something that I, Gao Bo, and all of the committee members had missed. At the close of the other two models, he likewise pointed out errors. Where I had seen incomplete mathematical models, Zhang Bing had, during their construction, discovered errors.