Ball Lightning(49)
Back at the base, the pilot, still shaken, recalled that when the thunderball had exploded in front of his helicopter, an electric discharge had flared from somewhere in the cabin, followed by smoke, and then the craft lost control. The crashed helicopter was burned beyond recognition, making it impossible to determine which part had been struck.
“What makes you sure that the thunderball had anything to do with the accident? Maybe it was a problem with the helicopter that just happened to coincide with the thunderball explosion,” Lin Yun said at the accident analysis meeting.
The pilot looked her straight in the eye with the expression of someone who had just awoken from a nightmare. “Major, I’d have agreed with you, except...?look.” And he held up his hands. “Is this a coincidence?”
Apart from his right thumb and the middle finger of his left hand, which had burnt remnants of fingernails, all of the nails on his fingers were gone. Then he took off his aviators’ boots. His toenails were entirely missing.
“When the thunderball exploded, I had a weird feeling in my fingers. I took off my gloves and saw my fingernails glowing red, but the next instant the light went out and all ten nails turned opaque white. I thought my hands had been burned, so I raised them to cool them in the air, but at the first wave the fingernails vanished in a cloud of ash.”
“And your hands weren’t burned?” Lin Yun said, grabbing his hands for a closer look.
“Believe it or not, they didn’t even feel warm. Besides, my boots and gloves are completely fine.”
The accident gave the project team its first experience of the threat of ball lightning, and afterward, they no longer called it “fluffy.” What surprised everyone the most was that the energy discharged by the thunderball acted on an object fifty meters away. Still, this phenomena was not at all rare in the more than ten thousand eyewitness accounts of ball lightning we had compiled.
And so the project reached an impasse. We had by that point excited forty-eight thunderballs, but we had also experienced a major accident; it was impossible for tests and observations to continue in this form. More importantly, everyone knew in their hearts that there was no point in risking it. We had been shaken not by the thunderball’s power, but by its almost supernatural strangeness. The aviator’s vanished fingernails reminded us that the secrets of the thunderball could not be unlocked through conventional means.
I remembered something Zhang Bin had said: “We’re both mortal men. We may have put far more into the search than other people, but we’re still mortal. We can only make deductions within the framework defined by fundamental theory, and dare not deviate from it, lest we step out into the airless void. But within this framework, we cannot deduce anything.” I included these lines in my report to the GAD leadership.
“Our approach to ball lightning research needs to adopt cutting-edge physics,” Lin Yun said.
“Yes,” Colonel Xu replied. “We need to bring in a superman.”
Ding Yi
GAD convened a meeting to discuss expanding the ball lightning project. The meeting was attended primarily by representatives of civilian sector research institutions, most of them specialists in physics, including several directors of state physics institutes, as well as the physics department heads at a few well-known universities. The chair of the meeting turned over a stack of forms they had collected, brief introductions of the participants’ specialties and achievements, as material for us to use in making our selection.
Neither Colonel Xu nor I was happy after we’d read through the materials.
“These are the country’s most outstanding scholars in the field,” the head of the Institute of Physics said.
“We believe it. But we need something more fundamental,” Colonel Xu said.
“More fundamental? Aren’t you doing lightning research? How fundamental does that need to be? You don’t expect us to simply fetch Stephen Hawking, do you?”
“Hawking would be wonderful!” Lin Yun said.
The GAD team glanced at each other. Then the academy head said to a physics department dean, “Well, send Ding Yi, then.”
“His research is fundamental?”
“The most fundamental.”
“How’s his scholarship?”
“The best in the country.”
“What’s his affiliation?”
“He’s unaffiliated.”
“We’re not looking for an outsider physicist.”
“Ding Yi holds two doctorates, in philosophy and physics, and a master’s in mathematics. I forget which branch. He’s been a senior professor and a CAS fellow, the youngest ever, and he once served as senior scientist on the national neutron decay study, for which he was rumored to be nominated for a Nobel in physics last year. Does that sound like an outsider physicist to you?”
“So why is he unaffiliated?”
The academy head and the physics dean both snorted. “Ask him yourself.”
*
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.