Ball Lightning(6)

“Quite a few. I’d say at least a thousand. The most famous was in 1998, when state television was shooting a documentary of the flood-fighting efforts on the Yangtze River and unwittingly recorded ball lightning on film.”

“One last question, Professor. In the atmospheric physics community, are there people who have personally witnessed ball lightning?”

Once again, he looked out the window at the setting sun. “Yes.”

“When?”

“In July 1962.”

“Where?”

“Yuhuang Peak on Mount Tai.”

“Do you know where that person is now?”

Zhang Bin shook his head, then raised his wrist and glanced at his watch: “You should head to the cafeteria for dinner.” Then he picked up his things and left the building.

I caught up to him and finally asked the question that had been in my mind all these years: “Professor Zhang, can you imagine a fireball-shaped object that can pass through walls, and can reduce a person to ashes instantaneously even though it doesn’t feel hot? There is a record of a sleeping couple reduced to ashes in their bed without a single scorch mark on their blanket! Can you imagine it entering a refrigerator and instantly turning all your frozen food cooked and piping hot without affecting the refrigerator’s operation? Can you imagine it burning your undershirt to a crisp without you feeling a thing? Can the theories you’ve mentioned explain all of this?”

“There’s no proof for any of those theories,” he said, without altering his stride.

“Then, if we leave the confines of atmospheric physics, do you think there is any explanation in the rest of physics, or even in all of science itself, for this phenomenon? Aren’t you even the least bit curious? Your reaction is even more shocking than seeing ball lightning itself!”

Zhang Bin stopped and turned to face me for the first time: “You’ve seen ball lightning?”

“...I was just speaking hypothetically.”

I could not reveal my deepest secret to this unfeeling person before me. Society was plagued by stoicism in the face of the profound mysteries of the natural world: its existence was the bane of science. If science had less of that sort of person, who knows, maybe humanity would have reached Alpha Centauri by now!

He said, “The field of atmospheric physics is very practical. Ball lightning is such a rare phenomenon that neither the IEC/TC-81 international standard for protection against lightning in structures nor China’s 1993 Standard for Protection of Structures Against Lightning dealt with it. So there’s really no point in devoting any effort to it.”

There was nothing I could say to a person like Zhang Bin, so I thanked him and left. And, truth be told, even admitting the existence of ball lightning was already a major step for him. Before the scientific community formally recognized its existence in 1963, all eyewitness accounts were judged hallucinations. One day that year, Roger Jennison, a professor of electronics at the University of Kent, personally witnessed ball lightning on an airplane departing New York in the form of a twenty-centimeter-wide fireball that passed through the wall separating the pilot’s cabin and the passenger cabin and down the aisle before disappearing through a wall.

That evening, I performed my first Google search for “ball lightning.” I was not particularly hopeful, but I ended up with more than forty thousand search results. For the first time since deciding to devote my entire life to this thing, I felt like the world was paying attention, too.

*

Another semester began, and then the sweltering summer arrived. For me, summer had an additional meaning: thunderstorms would appear and bring me that much closer to It.

One day, out of the blue, Zhang Bin came looking for me. The class I had with him had concluded the previous semester, and I had practically forgotten him.

He said, “Chen, I’ve heard that your parents are gone and you’re in a tight spot financially. I’ve got a summer project that needs another assistant. Can you come?”

“What sort of project?” I asked him.

“It’s a parameter determination for anti-lightning equipment for a railroad being built in Yunnan Province. And there’s one additional goal: in the new national standards for lightning protection currently under deliberation, the plan is to replace the ground flash density of 0.015 from the previous standard with one determined according to individual local conditions. We’re doing the observations in Yunnan.”

I agreed to go. Although I was not particularly rich, I could still get by. I agreed because this was my first chance for real hands-on lightning research.

The task force consisted of about a dozen people divided into five teams distributed over a large area, with several hundred kilometers between them. The group I was in had three members apart from the driver and experimental assistants: myself, Zhang Bin, and a grad student named Zhao Yu. When we reached our zone, we roomed at the county-level meteorological station.

The weather was quite good the next morning, so we could start our first day of field work. As we were moving the instruments and equipment out to the car from the room we were using as temporary storage, I asked, “Professor Zhang, what are some good ways for exploring the internal structure of lightning?”

He peered at me intently for a moment, as if aware of what I was thinking. “Judging from the current needs of domestic engineering projects, research on the lightning structure is not a priority. The priority right now is large-scale statistical research.” Whenever I brought up anything even remotely related to ball lightning, he dodged the question. Evidently the man genuinely detested everything that lacked practical value.