Ball Lightning

Lin Yun and I arrived at Ding Yi’s residence in a new apartment building in Haidian District. The door was ajar, and after pressing the doorbell several times with no response, we pushed it open and went in. The large apartment with its three bedrooms and two living rooms was mostly empty and had bare-bones decoration. The floor and windowsills were carpeted white with a large quantity of A4 paper, some of it blank, other sheets covered in formulas and peculiar graphs. Pencils were strewn about everywhere. One room held a bookcase and a computer. There were few books on the bookcase in that room, but it had the largest quantity of paper, rendering the floor barely visible. In a clearing in the center of the room, Ding Yi was sleeping in a deck chair. He was in his thirties, with a thin lanky body, and he was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and shorts. A strand of saliva hung from his mouth to the floor. Beside the chair was a small table holding an enormous ashtray and an opened pack of Stone Forest brand cigarettes. A few of the cigarettes had been broken open and their tobacco stuffed into a glass. Evidently he had fallen asleep while working. We called out to him a few times, but he did not respond, so we had to forge a path through the paper to the chair and push him awake.

“Hmm? Oh, right. You called this morning?” Ding Yi said, smacking away saliva. “There’s tea in the bookcase. Pour it yourself if you want some.” After sitting up, he suddenly burst out shouting: “Why did you mess up my calculations? I had them lined up, and now they’re out of order!” He got up and busied himself pushing about the paper we had cleared, blocking our retreat.

“Are you Professor Ding?” Lin Yun asked. She was clearly disappointed by her first impression of him.

“I am Ding Yi.” He opened up two folding chairs and motioned for us to sit down, then returned to his chair. He said, “Before you tell me why you’ve come, let me discuss with you a dream I’ve just had…. No, you’ve got to listen. It was a wonderful dream, which you interrupted. In the dream I was sitting here, a knife in my hand, around so long, like for cutting watermelon. Next to me was this tea table. But there wasn’t an ashtray or anything on it. Just two round objects, yea big. Circular, spherical. What do you think they were?”

“Watermelon?”

“No, no. One was a proton, the other a neutron. A watermelon-sized proton and neutron. I cut the proton open first. Its charge flowed out onto the table, all sticky, with a fresh fragrance. After I cut the proton in half, the quarks inside tumbled out, tinkling. They were about the size of walnuts, in all sorts of colors. They rolled about on the table, and some of them fell onto the floor. I picked up a white one. It was very hard, but with effort, I was able to bite into it. It tasted like a manaizi grape…. And right then, you woke me up.”

With a bit of a sneer, Lin Yun said, “Professor Ding, that’s a schoolboy’s dream. You ought to be aware that protons, neutrons, and quarks would exhibit quantum effects, and they wouldn’t look like that.”

Ding Yi stared at her for a few seconds. “Oh, of course. You’re totally right. I tend to oversimplify things. Imagine how wonderful life would be for me if protons and neutrons really were that big. They’re so tiny in reality that a knife to cut them open would cost billions. So this is just a poor child’s dream of candy. Don’t mock it.”

“I’ve heard that the state didn’t include the large hadron accelerator and collider in the latest sci-tech five-year plan,” I said.

“They said it was a pointless waste of resources, so we physicists have to continue to go cap in hand to Geneva and beg them for a pitiful scrap of experiment time.”

“But your neutron decay project was quite successful. They say you nearly won a Nobel.”

“Don’t go bringing that up. That’s why I’m in the state I’m in today, with nothing to do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, just a few innocuous remarks. It was last year at… I’ve forgotten where. Definitely Europe. On a prime-time talk show, the host asked me for my thoughts as a leading candidate for the Nobel Prize in Physics, and I said, ‘The Nobel? It’s never been given to superior minds, but favors competence and luck, like Einstein, who won for the photoelectric effect. Today, the Nobel is just a withered old whore, her charm gone, relying on flashy clothing and intricate tricks to win the favor of clients. I’m not interested in her. But the state invested a mint into the project, so I wouldn’t reject the prize if it was forced upon me.’”

Lin Yun and I looked at each other in surprise, and then burst out laughing. “That’s not cause for termination!”