Ball Lightning

Lin Yun laughed when she noticed my posture. “Relax. My dad’s got a science background and gets along well with technical people. He never supported lightning research, and now it looks as if he was right. But when I brought up ball lightning, he was pretty interested.”

Now a black-and-white photo on the wall caught my attention. It showed a young woman with a strong resemblance to Lin Yun wearing a plain military uniform.

Lin Yun got up and went over to the photo, and said simply, “My mom. She died in the border war in ’81…. Let’s talk about ball lightning instead. I hope you haven’t forgotten it entirely.”

“What have you been up to?”

“I had a large-scale computer at a Second Artillery Corps lab run the calculations for our final model. Thirty times, including predictions.” She shook her head gently, and I knew that the model had failed. “That was the first thing I did when I returned. But to be honest, I only ran it so that your work wasn’t a total waste.”

“Thank you. Really. But let’s not do any more mathematical models. There’s no point.”

“I’ve realized that, too. When I got back from our trip, I followed up through other channels and learned that over the past few decades, it wasn’t just the Soviet Union—the major Western powers invested immense sums in ball lightning research, too. Can we gain nothing from any of that?”

“None of them, including Gemow, have disclosed even the slightest bit of technical material.”

She laughed. “Look at you in your ivory tower.”

“I’m too much of a nerd.”

“I wouldn’t say that. If you really were, you wouldn’t have gone AWOL. But that shows that you’ve already seen what’s most important. The trip could have been a new starting point for us, but you turned it into an end point.”

“What did I see?”

“Conventional thinking will never be able to unlock the secret of ball lightning. This conclusion is worth billions!”

“That’s true. Even if we managed to twist the equations and force them into a mathematical model, intuition tells me that it wouldn’t actually describe reality. You can’t explain the sheer improbability of the selectivity and penetration of its energy release using conventional theory.”

“So we ought to broaden our thinking. Like you said, we’re not supermen, but starting now, we need to force ourselves to think in the manner of supermen.”

“I’ve already thought that way,” I said excitedly. “Ball lightning isn’t produced by lightning. It is a structure that already exists in the natural world.”

“You mean… lightning only ignites or excites it?” she rejoindered immediately.

“Precisely. Like electric current lighting a lamp. The lamp was always there.”

“Great. Let’s organize our thoughts a little…. My God! This idea would go a ways toward explaining what happened in Siberia!”

“That’s right. The twenty-seven occurrences of ball lightning at Base 3141 and the parameters for artificial lightning that produced them were totally unrelated. The structures just happened to be present on twenty-seven occasions, and that’s why they were excited.”

“Could the structure penetrate below ground…? Well, why not? People have often seen ball lightning coming out of the ground before earthquakes.”

We couldn’t contain our excitement, and paced the floor. “That means the error in prior research is all too obvious: we shouldn’t be trying to produce it, we should try to find it! Meaning, when we’re simulating lightning, the key factor isn’t the nature and structure of the lightning itself, much less any external factors such as EM fields or microwaves. It’s getting the lightning to cover as large a space as possible.”

“Correct!”

“Then what should our next step be?”

From behind us, General Lin called us to eat. A sumptuous feast was laid out on the table in the living room. “Remember, Xiao Yun, we invited Dr. Chen over as a guest. No work talk over dinner,” General Lin said, as he refilled my glass.

Lin Yun said, “This isn’t work. It’s a hobby.”

Then we turned toward some more casual topics. I learned that General Lin had been a top student at PLA Military Engineering Institute in Harbin, where he had studied electronics. But he hadn’t touched technology work since that time, transferring to pure military affairs and becoming one of the few senior generals in the army with a technical background.

“I suspect Ohm’s Law is the sum total of what you remember of your studies,” Lin Yun said.

The general laughed. “You underestimate me. But it’s computers, not electronics, that most impress me now. The first computer I saw was a Soviet one, I forget the clock speed but it had 4K of memory—magnetic core memory, mind you, held in a box taller than that bookshelf. But the biggest difference from today was in the software. Xiao Yun loves to boast how awesome a programmer she is, but on that machine, she’d find it hard to code a program for ’3+2’ without breaking a sweat.”

“You used assembly in those days?”