Лю Цысинь - Ball Lightning

“This theory is too bizarre to accept.”

“Without experimental evidence, it would be. But the quantum effect was proven at the microscopic level early on in the last century. Now we’ve finally observed its macroscopic manifestation…. If only Bohr were alive, or de Broglie, or Heisenberg and Dirac…” Ding Yi grew emotional, and paced back and forth as if sleepwalking, muttering to himself.

“It’s a good thing Einstein is dead,” Lin Yun said.

Then I remembered something: Ding Yi had insisted on installing four surveillance systems in the lab where macro-electron excitement had been carried out, in addition to the high-speed cameras. I asked him about it.

“Right. That was out of safety concerns. If all of the systems failed, the ball lightning would be in a quantum state that would engulf a good portion of the base in an electron cloud. Ball lightning could suddenly appear at any location.”

And then I understood why, in so many eyewitness accounts throughout history, ball lightning had appeared mysteriously and drifted randomly, always popping up out of nowhere, with no nearby lightning to excite it. This quite probably was because the observer was within a macro-electron probability cloud, and the chance observation caused the ball lightning’s quantum state to collapse.

I exclaimed, “I thought I already more or less understood ball lightning. I never imagined—”

“There’s lots you haven’t imagined, Dr. Chen. You can’t imagine the sheer oddity of nature,” Ding Yi said, cutting me off.

“What else?”

“There are things I can’t even bring myself to discuss with you,” Ding Yi said in a low voice.

This didn’t sink in at first, but after a second of thought, I shuddered. I looked up at him, and saw him staring at me with a snakelike gleam in his eye that made my whole body shiver. Deep in my consciousness was a dark and shadowy place that I had striven to forget, and had nearly succeeded—a place I did not now dare to touch.

In the next two days of experiments, ball lightning’s macro-quantum effect received further confirmation. When observers were removed, the ball lightning shot from the thunderball weapon missed by wide margins, and hit targets at a rate of only one-tenth of that when an observer was present. We brought in additional equipment and performed more complicated tests, chiefly in an attempt to determine the size of the probability cloud of a macro-electron in a quantum state. Using a strict quantum mechanics definition, this terminology wasn’t entirely correct, since an electron (whether macro or micro) has a probability cloud the size of the entire universe, so it was possible that ball lightning in a quantum state might appear in the Andromeda Nebula, although the probability of that was infinitesimally small. We used “probability cloud” in engineering terms, to refer to a fuzzy boundary beyond which the chance was so low as to be insignificant.

But on the third day, the unexpected happened. Without any observer present, the ten shots from the thunderball gun all struck the target. They were a class of macro-electrons that released energy into metal and had been excited into a high-energy state. A third of the junked armored vehicle serving as the target was liquefied.

“Something must have been overlooked and left behind an observer. Maybe one of the cameras wasn’t turned off. Or, more likely, some soldier snuck a peek, to see what a macro-electron cloud looks like,” Ding Yi said decisively.

And so before the next test, the two cameras were dismantled, and all of the personnel on the target range were removed to a shielded basement cut off from the outside world. With the range empty, the already-aimed thunderball guns were switched to automatic fire mode.

But every one of the fifteen shots of ball lightning struck the target.

I was pleased that something had stumped Ding Yi, even if it was only a momentary difficulty. Looking over the results, he did seem worried, but his worry was different from what I imagined, and he didn’t seem overly perplexed. “Stop all tests and live fire training immediately,” he told Lin Yun.

Lin Yun looked at him, and then glanced up at the sky.

I said, “Why do we have to stop? There was no quantum effect this time despite the complete absence of an observer. We have to find the reason.”

Lin Yun looked up and shook her head. “No, there was an observer.”

I looked up at the sky, and realized that at some point the clouds had parted, and a thin strip of blue was visible through the crack.

We returned from the south to a Beijing autumn where the nights were already chilly.

The temperatures dropped, and with them the military’s enthusiasm for ball lightning weapons. Back at the base, we learned from Colonel Xu that the General Staff Department and the General Armaments Department were not planning on equipping troops with these weapons in large numbers, and Dawnlight would not be expanded in size. This attitude on the part of the higher-ups was primarily motivated by the probability that the enemy would build defenses against ball lightning weapons. The weapons we had come up with were their own nemesis: ball lightning could be both accelerated and deflected in a magnetic field, so the enemy could use a reverse magnetic field to defend against it. Once the weapon made it into a combat situation, it would quickly meet an effective defense.

The next stage of research at the base followed two forks: a search for a way to breach the magnetic field defense, and a reorientation of ball lightning’s target from personnel to weapons equipment, particularly high-tech weapons.

The first idea was to collect macro-electrons that would melt wiring. This would be an effective way to disable the enemy’s high-tech weapons. But a serious problem was discovered during experiments: ball lightning that would melt wiring would also discharge into large metal objects, and since melting large metal objects required immense amounts of power, most of the energy in this form of ball lightning was discharged into the metal object, with little released into the wire. Efficiency was poor, and potential damage to the weaponry was very limited.

Our very next thought, naturally, was that electronic chips might make an excellent target for ball lightning weapons. First of all, unlike wires, chips were made of a unique material for which nothing similar yet nonessential existed to split the ball lightning’s energy. Additionally, chips were small, so a relatively minor discharge could destroy a large number of them. Chip destruction was absolutely fatal to modern high-tech weaponry. But macro-electrons that discharged into chips (we called them chip-eating macro-electrons) were very rare, like pearls in the imperial crown of ball lightning. To collect a sufficient quantity of them required capturing a huge number of macro-electrons to subject to spectral recognition, for which substantial funds were needed. But the higher-ups had stopped further investment in the project.

To gain their attention, and to win research funding, Colonel Xu decided to conduct an attack exercise using the chip-eaters we had already collected.

The exercise was conducted at the MBT 2005 test base, where Lin Yun and I had gone to learn about the feeler defense system. Now all was quiet here. Weeds grew in the vehicle tracks. All we could see were two MBT 2005s that had been brought here the day before for use as test targets.

Initially, only General Armaments Department personnel were supposed to watch the tests, but a notice sent two hours beforehand doubled the number of observers. Most of them were from the General Staff Department, and included a major general and a lieutenant general.