Ball Lightning

“You don’t need one. I didn’t put the screws back after the last time.”

And so he began feeling around the laptop. They were ordinarily hard to dismantle, but mine was a late-model modular Dell, so he was easily able to open the bottom of the case. As he worked, he said, “Do you remember the first time we used the high-speed camera to record the ball lightning’s energy discharge? We played it back frame by frame, and when we reached the point where the incinerated wooden cube was a transparent outline, we paused the image. Do you remember what Lin Yun said then?”

“She shouted: ‘It’s like a cubic bubble!’ ”

“That’s right…. Pay attention to the screen as I look inside,” he said, then bent at the waist and peered into the interior of the open computer.

At that moment, the screen went black, except for two lines displaying a self-check error message, indicating that no CPU or memory had been found.

Ding Yi flipped over the computer to show me the motherboard, where the CPU and RAM slots were empty.

“The moment I observed this, the quantum wave function collapsed.” He set the computer carefully down on the table. Its screen remained black.

“Do you mean that the incinerated CPU and memory sticks exist in a quantum state, just like the macro-electrons?”

“Yes. In other words, when the chips experience matter-wave resonance with the macro-electron, they turn into a macro-particle in a quantum state. Ball lightning’s energy release is essentially the full or partial superposition of the probability clouds of it and its target. The chips’ state is indeterminate—they exist between two states, destroyed and undestroyed. Just now, when the computer started up, they were in the latter state, the CPU and memory completely unharmed and plugged into their slots in the motherboard. But when I observed them, their quantum states collapsed back into a destroyed state.”

“In the absence of the observer, when will the chips exist in an undestroyed state?”

“That’s undetermined. They only exist as the probability of an event. You can consider the chips in this computer to be within the probability cloud.”

“Then the animals that were burned up—are they in a quantum state, too?” I asked nervously, with the premonition that I was nearing an unbelievable truth.

Ding Yi nodded.

I didn’t have the courage to ask my next question, but Ding Yi looked calmly at me, and clearly knew what I was thinking.

“Yes, the people too. All the people who have been killed by ball lightning exist in a quantum state. Strictly speaking, they haven’t really died. They’re like Schrödinger’s cat, and exist indeterminately in two states, living and dead.” Ding Yi stood up and walked to the window and looked out at the deep night. “To them, to be or not to be is indeed a question.”

“Can we see them?”

Ding Yi waved a hand at the window, as if resolutely dismissing the idea from my brain. “Impossible. We’ll never be able to see them, since their collapsed state is death. They exist alive for a certain probability of the quantum state, but when we appear as observers, they immediately collapse to a destroyed state, to their urns or graves.”

“Do you mean they’re alive in some parallel universe?”

“No, no. You’ve misunderstood. They live in our own world. Their probability cloud might cover quite a large area. Perhaps they’re even standing in this room, right behind you.”

The skin crawled on my back.

Ding Yi turned around and pointed behind me. “But when you turn around to take a look, they immediately collapse to a destroyed state. Trust me: neither you nor any other person will ever be able to see them. That includes cameras and other observers. Detection of their presence is impossible.”

“Can they leave traces behind in the real world that are not in a quantum state?”

“They can. I suspect you’ve already seen such traces.”

“Then why don’t they write me a letter!” I shouted, losing control. By “they,” I meant only two people.

“Compared to an object like a computer chip, a conscious being in a quantum state, particularly a human, behaves in a far more complicated manner. How they interact with us in the non-quantum-state world is an unanswered mystery, one that contains many logical and even philosophical traps. For example: maybe they have written, but how large is the probability that those letters would have a non-quantum state for you to read them? Also, is the real world in a quantum state for them? If it is, then they will have a very hard time finding this state of you in your probability cloud. For them, the road home is long and uncertain…. But that’s enough. These are things that can’t be figured out in a short amount of time. Get stuck down a blind alley and you’ll burn out. Take your time to think things over later.”

I said nothing. How could I stop thinking?

Ding Yi picked up a more than half-filled bottle of Red Star erguotou from the table, and poured us each a glass. “Come on. This might push those thoughts from your mind.”