Ball Lightning(8)

“What could you produce under those extreme physical conditions?” I asked Zhao Yu.

“Produce?” he said dismissively. “The power of an atomic blast or a high energy accelerator is far greater, yet it won’t produce the sort of thing you’re thinking of. Atmospheric physics is a mundane subject, yet you want to turn it mysterious. I’m the opposite: I’m used to taking sacred things and turning them ordinary.” Saying this, he gazed out into the dark green of the tropical rain forest that surrounded the weather station. “Hey, you go chasing after your mysterious fireball. I’m going to enjoy an ordinary life.”

His career as a master’s student was reaching an end, and he had no desire to continue on to a PhD.

*

Back at school, classes continued, and I took part in a few more of Zhang Bin’s projects outside of class and during the holidays. His methodical fastidiousness sometimes annoyed me, but apart from that he was easygoing enough, and I gained an immense amount of practical experience from him. But more importantly, his specialty was in line with my own quest.

For that reason, when it came time to graduate, I chose to test into the master’s program under him.

As I had anticipated, he firmly opposed my choice of ball lightning as a master’s thesis topic. In all other matters he was accommodating, including tolerating a lazy student like Zhao Yu, but in this there could be no accommodation.

“Young people should not get wrapped up in imaginary things,” he said.

“The existence of ball lightning is recognized by the scientific community. You think it’s imaginary?”

“Fine, I’ll repeat myself. What point is there to something that is not included in international standards or national regulations? When you were an undergraduate, you could study your own specialty using basic scientific techniques, but now that you are a graduate student, that’s no longer acceptable.”

“But Professor Zhang, atmospheric physics is pretty much a basic discipline now. It’s not just a tool for engineering; it has a duty to help us understand the world.”

“But in this country, the priority is to serve the cause of economic development.”

“Even so, if the anti-lightning measures at the Huangdao Oil Port had taken ball lightning into account, the 1989 catastrophe might have been avoided.”

“The source of the fire in Huangdao is just conjecture. Research on ball lightning itself is full of more conjecture. From now on, you’re going to avoid such harmful elements in your studies.”

There would be no further discussion of the subject. I was prepared to devote my entire life to that quest, so it was unimportant what I studied for the three years I was in graduate school. So I submitted to Zhang Bin’s suggestion and did a project on lightning defense computer systems.

*

Three years later, my graduate studies reached a smooth and uneventful conclusion.

To be fair, I learned quite a bit from Zhang Bin during those three years, and I benefited substantially from his technical rigor, proficient experimental skill set, and rich engineering experience. But, as I knew three years before, the core of what I required I was unable to find with him.

I also learned a fair amount about his personal life: his wife had died long ago, he had no children, he had lived alone for many years, and he had few social interactions. His humdrum existence echoed my own, but, to my mind, that lifestyle required the presence of an overpowering quest—a “fascination with something,” in my dad’s words, or what the pretty girl in the library six years ago had called “a sense of purpose.” Zhang Bin, with no goals and no fascination with anything, mechanically carried out his boring applied research, treating it as a job rather than a pleasure. His attitude toward fame and fortune displayed a similar rigidity. If that really were how he felt, then life must be a kind of torment for him, and hence I felt a little sympathy.

However, I did not think I was ready to explore the mystery quite yet. No, everything I had studied over the course of six years only made me feel my impotence all the more strongly. My first efforts were primarily in physics, but I eventually discovered that physics itself was a huge mystery, at the far end of which the very existence of the world was called into question. And assuming that ball lightning was not a supernatural phenomenon, only relatively low-level physics would be necessary to understand it: Maxwell’s Equations and the Navier-Stokes Equations in fluid mechanics would be sufficient (how superficial and na?ve were my initial ideas). But compared to ball lightning, all known structures in electromagnetism and fluid mechanics were simple. If ball lightning was indeed a complicated structure in stable equilibrium constrained by the basic laws of electromagnetism and fluid mechanics, its mathematical expression would have to be incredibly complex, just like simple rules for black and white pieces can describe the intricate positions of Go, the world’s most complicated game.

This, then, was what I felt I needed now: first, mathematics; second, mathematics; and third, more mathematics. Complex mathematical tools were absolutely necessary for cracking the secret of ball lightning, tools as unruly as an unbridled mustang. Although Zhang Bin felt that my math skills far exceeded the standard requirements of atmospheric physics, I knew that I was still far from the level required for ball lightning research. As soon as complicated electromagnetic and fluid structures got involved, mathematical descriptions turned savage, involving weird partial differential equations that tangled up like twine, and dense matrices that held blade-filled traps.