Ball Lightning

My first thought at this point was that I could breathe at last. My mind had been asphyxiating for more than a decade, and all that time it felt like I’d been immersed in water that was murky at every turn. Now I had burst to the surface, and I took my first breath of air, and saw the vast sky. A blind man probably has the same feeling on regaining his sight.

“We’re able to see the bubbles because the curved space bends the light that passes through, forming visible edges,” Ding Yi went on.

“But what makes you believe they’re electrons, and not protons or neutrons?” Colonel Xu asked.

“Good question. But the answer is quite simple: throughout the process of being excited by lightning, turning to ball lightning, and then returning to bubbles, the bubbles are actually electrons being excited from a low potential to high potential state, and then returning back to a low potential state. Of those three particles, only electrons can be excited in this way.”

“And because it’s an electron, it can be conducted through superconducting leads, and run ceaselessly through a superconducting battery, like a loop current,” Lin Yun said, as understanding dawned.

“What’s weird, though, is that its diameter is about the same as that battery.”

“With macro-electrons, the wave form is dominant in the wave-particle duality, so the significance of its size is completely different from what we generally expect. They also have some pretty unbelievable characteristics, which we’ll gradually observe, and which I believe will change everyone’s view of the world. But right now, we need to choose a name for these large electrons. They’re electrons on a macroscopic scale, so let’s call them macro-electrons.”

“Then do macro-protons and macro-neutrons also exist?”

“They ought to. But since they can’t be excited, we’ll have a hard time finding them.”

“Professor Ding, your dream has become reality,” Lin Yun said, but apart from Ding Yi and me, no one really understood the meaning of her words.

“Yes, yes. There really are watermelon-sized fundamental particles lying on the table of physics. Our next step must be to study their internal structure—a structure formed from curved space. It will be difficult. But innumerable times easier, I believe, than studying the structure of microscopic particles.”

“Then, are there macro-atoms too? The three macro-particles ought to be able to combine into atoms!”

“Yes, there ought to be macro-atoms.”

“The bubble—I mean, the macro-electron—that we caught: is it a free electron, or does it belong to a macro-atom? And if so, where’s its nucleus?”

Ding Yi chuckled. “You’ve got me there. But there’s an immense amount of space in an atom. If a macro-atom is the size of a theater hall, the nucleus would be about the size of a walnut. So if this macro-electron does belong to a macro-atom, then the nucleus would be quite far from here.”

“My God. One more question: If there are macro-atoms, then is there macro-matter, and a macro-world?”

“Now we’re into grand questions of philosophy,” Ding Yi said to the questioner with a smile.

“So is there or isn’t there a macro-world?” the questioner followed. We were like a group of children in the thrall of a story.

“I believe there’s a macro-world. Or a macro-universe. But what it’s like is an unknown unknown. Maybe it’s completely different from our own world. Maybe it corresponds exactly, like the posited matter and antimatter universes, and there’s a macro-Earth with a macro-you and -me. In that case, my brain in the macro-world would be large enough to contain our universe’s entire solar system…. It’s a parallel universe, in a way.”

Night had fallen, and we looked up at the glittering summer sky, each of us straining our eyes into the vast star field, hoping to find, somewhere in the cosmic downy empty depths of the Milky Way, the enormous outlines of Ding Yi’s brain. That macro-atom-made ultra-head was, in my mind, crystal clear. We were amazed that our thoughts had turned so profound all of a sudden.

* * *

After the dinner ended, we strolled tipsily on the grassland. I saw Ding Yi and Lin Yun close together, talking intimately. Ding Yi’s three flags looked dashing in the night breeze, and I knew that this thin beanstalk of a guy would easily defeat the full-on masculine appeal of the carrier captain. This was the power of the mind. For whatever reason, my heart was filled with an inexpressible bitterness.

The stars in the heavens were as brilliant as they were on Mount Tai. In the night of the grassland, countless ghostly macro-electrons were drifting by.

Weapons

From the first successful capture of a bubble, research blazed a new trail, and forward progress smoothed out as results came in one after another. It was a little like riding a roller coaster. Once I proposed the excitement hypothesis for ball lightning, and Ding Yi used theory to describe the existence of macro-electrons, Lin Yun’s technical genius began to play a critical role.