Ball Lightning

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.