Лю Цысинь - Ball Lightning

“And the final outcome?” I asked. At last, the critical question.

Gemow took out another cigarette, lit it, and took a deep drag, but did not speak. The flashlight didn’t give me a clear look at his expression, but he reminded me of how Zhang Bin had looked when describing his unspeakable pain as a ball lightning researcher. So I answered for Gemow. “There was never any success, was there?”

But immediately I realized I was wrong, because Gemow laughed. “Young man, you’re thinking too simplistically. Holmes said, ‘It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery. The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious.’ It would have been very weird if there were not a single success in thirty years of research, weird enough to encourage people to continue. The tragedy was the lack of even that weirdness. All we had was a frustrating boredom. We succeeded, over the course of thirty years, in producing ball lightning twenty-seven times.”

Lin Yun and I were stunned, and for a moment had nothing to say.

Gemow laughed again. “I can imagine you are feeling two different things right now. Major Lin Yun is no doubt pleased, since all a soldier cares about is the possibility of making a weapon. You, however, are despondent. You’re like Scott reaching the South Pole at last, only to see the Norwegian flag that Amundsen left behind. But neither feeling is necessary. Ball lightning remains a mystery. No more is certain than when we first came here more than thirty years ago. Truly, we came out of it with nothing.”

“What does that mean?” Lin Yun asked in wonder.

Gemow let out a slow cloud of smoke and stared at its transformations in the beams of light, sunken into memory of the past. “The first successful generation of ball lightning was in 1962, the third year after research began. I personally witnessed it. After a discharge from the lightning simulator it appeared in midair, light yellow in color, dragging a tail behind it as it flew for around twenty seconds before vanishing without a sound.”

Lin Yun said, “I can imagine how excited you must have been.”

Gemow shook his head. “Wrong again. To us, that ball lightning was just an ordinary electromagnetic phenomenon. Project 3141 was not intended to be so large-scale at first, so at the time, everyone from the senior leaders in the military and the Academy to the scientists and engineers on the project believed that a country that had sent a man into space merely needed to focus its research efforts and artificial ball lightning would only be a matter of time. In fact, three years without any success already came as a surprise to many people. With the appearance of that ball lightning we felt only a sense of relief. No one could have predicted the ensuing twenty-seven years and the ultimate failure that awaited us.

“Our confidence at the time appeared well-grounded: unlike natural lightning, the conditions and parameters for the lightning we generated had all been recorded in detail. I can write them out perfectly even today. The lightning current was twelve thousand amps, voltage eighty million volts, discharge time 119 microseconds. Entirely ordinary lightning. At the time of discharge, airflow was 2.4 meters per second, microwaves at 550 watts of power, and an external magnetic field…. And loads of other parameters, from ordinary ones like air temperature and pressure, to the more particular, like ultra-high-speed imaging of the lightning path, and instrument recordings of the strength and shape of the electromagnetic field and radioactive indices. On and on, all of it recorded into reference material I recall as being at least as thick as War and Peace , and all of it top secret. It was right at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I remember Niernov holding up that stack of material and saying, ‘It’s no big deal if we recall the missiles. We’ve got something that will send a bigger shock into imperialism!’ We all thought that by repeatedly generating lightning according to those parameters, we could make ball lightning in quantity.”

“You couldn’t?” I asked.

“I said you were thinking too simplistically. Nobody expected what happened next: when the test was repeated using the same set of parameters, nothing happened. Niernov, extremely irritated, continued the experiments throughout the following year in strict accordance with the recorded parameters, producing lightning fifty thousand times, but there was never any trace of ball lightning.

“I should explain that in the Soviet scientific community in those days, mechanistic determinism held sway over all other approaches. Researchers believed that the natural world was governed by the iron law of cause and effect. This mentality was a product of the political environment. Renegades like Gamow [4] George Gamow (1904–1968), theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He defected in 1933 and ended up in the United States. were still rare. This was the case even in basic science and pure theory. For ball lightning, which was classified as an applied project at the time, people’s minds were even more constrained by traditional linear thinking. They were unable to accept the outcome of the tests, believing that if they successfully produced ball lightning once, they should be able to produce it in subsequent tests using the same parameters. And so Niernov arrived at the obvious conclusion about the fifty thousand tests: the data for the ball lightning test had been recorded incorrectly.

“It wasn’t a big deal at first. Entirely solvable within the normal scope of work, and the most anyone would be penalized for would be for dereliction of duty. But Niernov made it political. His dictatorial style had made him lots of enemies, and now he was presented with an opportunity to get rid of dissent. In an alarmist report he submitted to the supreme leadership, he said that Project 3141 had been sabotaged by imperialist spies. And since Project 3141 was a key national weapons research program, his report received swift attention, and a large-scale investigation was launched.

“The investigation team was made up largely of GRU  [5] “Main Intelligence Directorate,” the foreign military intelligence agency under the General Staff of the Soviet Army. personnel, with Niernov a key member. To explain the ensuing experimental failures, 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. Niernov believed that in every test, the saboteur had caused the system to deviate from the preset parameters, but as luck would have it, one of the deviations ended up producing ball lightning. Of course, there was no record of what the deviation was, since only the preset parameters were recorded.

“The explanation may have been a little unusual, but it was the only one the investigation team was able to accept at the time. The next issue was which parameter experienced a deviation. Tests had been performed using four systems: the lightning simulator, the external magnetic field, the microwave emitter, and aerodynamics, each of which was formed of mostly independent personnel. This made it unlikely that a saboteur would have been able to penetrate several at once, so at first, deviation in only one system was considered. The mostly unanimous thinking at the time was that the key parameter was the discharge value in the lightning simulation system. The person in charge of the design and operation of this system was none other than me.