Ball Lightning(58)

“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.”

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?”