Ball Lightning(64)

“Good. Now you all can open your eyes,” Ding Yi choked out through the ozone produced by the ball lightning explosions.

I opened my eyes and felt a momentary lightheadedness, and listened to the target reporter’s voice on the radio: “Shots fired: ten. Hits: one. Misses: nine.” Then in a softer voice, “What the hell!” A number of soldiers, I noticed, were scrambling to put out brush fires started by the errant ball lightning explosions.

“How did that happen?” Lieutenant Colonel Kang demanded of the shooter behind the thunderball weapon. “Didn’t you aim properly before you shut your eyes?”

“We did! The aim was dead-on!” the sergeant said.

“Then...?inspect the weapon.”

“That’s not necessary. There’s nothing wrong with the weapon or the shooter,” Ding Yi said with a wave of his hand. “Don’t forget, ball lightning is an electron.”

“You mean it exhibits a quantum effect?” I asked.

Ding Yi nodded. “Indeed it does. In the presence of an observer, its state collapses to a determined value. This value is consistent with our experience in the macro-world, so it strikes the target. But without an observer, it exhibits a quantum state where nothing is determined, and its position can only be described as a probability. In such circumstances, all of this ball lightning exists in the form of an electron cloud—a probability cloud. And a strike on the target location is very improbable.”

“So you mean that the thunderballs can’t strike anything we can’t see?” the lieutenant colonel asked in disbelief.

“That’s right. Wonderful, isn’t it?”

“It’s a little too...?anti-materialistic,” Lin Yun said, shaking her head in confusion.

“See, now that’s philosophy. It may have been forced, but you’ve done it.” Ding Yi made a face at me, and then said to Lin Yun, “Don’t try to school me in philosophy.”

“Right. I’m not qualified. The world would be a terrible place if everyone shared your ultimate line of thinking,” Lin Yun said, shrugging.

“You surely know a little bit of the principles of quantum mechanics,” Ding Yi said.

“Yes, I do. More than just a little. But...”

“But you never expected to see it in the macro-world, right?”

The lieutenant colonel said, “Do you mean to say that if the thunderballs are to strike a target, we must watch them from start to finish?”

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.