Ball Lightning

Colonel Xu gave a small speech: “In olden days, there must have been a day when someone had a stroke of inspiration and understood that they were surrounded by air. Later, people learned that they were constrained by gravity, and that their surroundings were an ocean of electromagnetic waves, and that cosmic radiation passes through our bodies at all times…. Now we know something else: that bubbles are there around us, floating nearby in space that appears empty. Now, let me speak for us all, and offer Professor Ding and Major Lin my well-deserved admiration.”

Again, everyone cheered.

Ding Yi went over to Lin Yun, raised up a large saucer (he was a boozer as well as a smoker), and said, “Major, I used to have a prejudice against soldiers. I thought you were the epitome of mechanical thinking. But you have changed my ideas.”

Lin Yun looked at him wordlessly. I had never seen that expression in her eyes before toward anyone—not even, I’m willing to believe, Jiang Xingchen.

And then I realized that in the midst of all of the uniforms, Ding Yi stood out. In the hot summer wind on the grassland, he seemed formed of three flags: one, his wind-tossed long hair, and the two others his large sleeveless T-shirt and shorts that whipped constantly about his thin stalk of a body, like flags hung on a flagpole. Next to him, Lin Yun cut a lovely figure in the evening light.

Colonel Xu said, “Now you all must be brimming with anticipation for Professor Ding to tell us just what ball lightning is.”

Ding Yi nodded. “I know that lots of people have poured immense effort into unlocking the secret of nature, including the likes of Dr. Chen and Major Lin. They devoted their life’s energies to taking the EM and fluid equations and twisting them to mind-shattering degrees, until they nearly broke. Then they put in one patch after another to plug the holes, adding extra struts to support the teetering edifice, ultimately coming up with something far too huge and complicated, and incomparably ugly…. Dr. Chen, do you know where you failed? It wasn’t that you weren’t complex enough. It was that you didn’t think simply.”

It was the same thing I’d heard from Lin Yun’s father. Two uncommon men in two different fields had come up with the same profound observation.

“How simple could it be?” I asked, mystified.

Ding Yi disregarded my question and went on: “Next, I will tell you what ball lightning is.”

At this moment, the few scattered stars that had begun to appear in the heavens seemed to stop their twinkling, as if listening for God’s last judgment.

“It is nothing more than an electron.”

We looked at each other, each of us trying to wrap our minds around this. Eventually we focused our attention back on Ding Yi. His answer was so weird that we lacked the ability to take it any further.

“An electron the size of a soccer ball,” he added.

“An electron the… What makes it like that?” someone stammered.

“What do you think an electron ought to be like? An opaque, dense little ball? Yes, that’s the picture of an electron, proton, or neutron in most people’s minds. First I’ll tell you about the picture of the universe painted by modern physics: the geometry of the universe is not physical.”

“Can you be a little less abstract?”

“What if I put it this way: in the universe, apart from empty space, there is nothing.”

Again we lapsed into silence and contemplated what our minds couldn’t grasp. Captain Liu was the first to speak. He waved half a lamb leg in the air and said, “What do you mean, nothing? It’s all empty space? This roast whole mutton is totally tangible. Are you telling me that I’ve just eaten emptiness?”

“Yes. All of what you’ve eaten is empty space, as are you, since you and the mutton are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, particles that, on a microscopic level, are curved space.” He cleared aside a few plates and drew on the tablecloth with a finger. “Suppose that space is this cloth. Atomic particles are the minute wrinkles in it.”

“That’s something we can understand a bit better,” Captain Liu said thoughtfully.

“It’s still quite different from our conventional picture of the world,” Lin Yun said.

“But it’s the picture that’s closest to reality,” Ding Yi said.

“So you mean that electrons are like bubbles?”

“Closed curved space,” Ding Yi agreed, nodding gravely.

“But an electron… how is it so big?”

“In the briefest period after the Big Bang, all of space was flat. Later, as energy levels subsided, wrinkles appeared in space, which gave birth to all of the fundamental particles. What’s been so mystifying for us is why the wrinkles should only appear at the microscopic level. Are there really no macroscopic wrinkles? Or, in other words, are there no macroscopic fundamental particles? Now we know there are.”