Ball Lightning

Ding Yi nodded, and said, “Or the enemy could watch them. But there must be an observer.”

“Let’s do it again, and see what a probability cloud looks like,” Lin Yun said excitedly.

Ding Yi shook his head. “That’s impossible. The quantum state is only exhibited in the absence of an observer. Once the observer appears, it collapses into our experienced reality. We will never be able to see a probability cloud.”

“Can’t we just put a camera onto a drone?” the lieutenant colonel said.

“A camera is an observer, too, and will likewise collapse the quantum state. This is why I had all of the monitoring equipment shut off.”

“But the cameras don’t have consciousness,” Lin Yun said.

“Now who’s being anti-materialistic? The observer doesn’t need consciousness.” Ding Yi grinned devilishly at her.

“This can’t be right,” I said, feeling like I’d found a flaw in his thinking. “If it’s as you say, then wouldn’t anything in the vicinity of ball lightning be an observer? Just like they leave an image of themselves in the camera’s photoreceptive system, ball lightning also leave ionized traces behind in the air. The light they give off causes a response in the surrounding plants, and their sound vibrates the sand…. The surrounding environment retains traces of them to some extent. There’s no difference between this and the images taken by the camera.”

“Yes. But there’s a huge difference in the strength of the observer. A camera recording an image is a strong observer. Sand vibrating in place on the ground is a weak observer. Weak observers can also cause the quantum state to collapse, but it is very unlikely.”

“This theory is too bizarre to accept.”

“Without experimental evidence, it would be. But the quantum effect was proven at the microscopic level early on in the last century. Now we’ve finally observed its macroscopic manifestation…. If only Bohr were alive, or de Broglie, or Heisenberg and Dirac…” Ding Yi grew emotional, and paced back and forth as if sleepwalking, muttering to himself.

“It’s a good thing Einstein is dead,” Lin Yun said.

Then I remembered something: Ding Yi had insisted on installing four surveillance systems in the lab where macro-electron excitement had been carried out, in addition to the high-speed cameras. I asked him about it.

“Right. That was out of safety concerns. If all of the systems failed, the ball lightning would be in a quantum state that would engulf a good portion of the base in an electron cloud. Ball lightning could suddenly appear at any location.”

And then I understood why, in so many eyewitness accounts throughout history, ball lightning had appeared mysteriously and drifted randomly, always popping up out of nowhere, with no nearby lightning to excite it. This quite probably was because the observer was within a macro-electron probability cloud, and the chance observation caused the ball lightning’s quantum state to collapse.

I exclaimed, “I thought I already more or less understood ball lightning. I never imagined—”

“There’s lots you haven’t imagined, Dr. Chen. You can’t imagine the sheer oddity of nature,” Ding Yi said, cutting me off.

“What else?”

“There are things I can’t even bring myself to discuss with you,” Ding Yi said in a low voice.

This didn’t sink in at first, but after a second of thought, I shuddered. I looked up at him, and saw him staring at me with a snakelike gleam in his eye that made my whole body shiver. Deep in my consciousness was a dark and shadowy place that I had striven to forget, and had nearly succeeded—a place I did not now dare to touch.

* * *

In the next two days of experiments, ball lightning’s macro-quantum effect received further confirmation. When observers were removed, the ball lightning shot from the thunderball weapon missed by wide margins, and hit targets at a rate of only one-tenth of that when an observer was present. We brought in additional equipment and performed more complicated tests, chiefly in an attempt to determine the size of the probability cloud of a macro-electron in a quantum state. Using a strict quantum mechanics definition, this terminology wasn’t entirely correct, since an electron (whether macro or micro) has a probability cloud the size of the entire universe, so it was possible that ball lightning in a quantum state might appear in the Andromeda Nebula, although the probability of that was infinitesimally small. We used “probability cloud” in engineering terms, to refer to a fuzzy boundary beyond which the chance was so low as to be insignificant.

But on the third day, the unexpected happened. Without any observer present, the ten shots from the thunderball gun all struck the target. They were a class of macro-electrons that released energy into metal and had been excited into a high-energy state. A third of the junked armored vehicle serving as the target was liquefied.