Ball Lightning(90)

“I’ll get a flashlight!” Lin Yun said, running off along the path between the ranks of gravestones to the car. When she returned with a flashlight in hand, the lighter flame had gone out. She found Ding Yi sitting with his back against the gravestone and his legs stretched out in front of him, looking at the stars.

On the gravestone, the inscription had vanished without a trace. The smooth marble surface reflected the flashlight beam like a mirror.

At the light from the flashlight, Ding Yi regained his senses like a man waking from a dream. He reached out, pulled Lin Yun around to the back of the gravestone, and pointed to its base. “Look at that. There’s one line left. It’s not in a quantum state, and it’s the only line of the inscription in Chinese.” Lin Yun crouched down and read the elegantly carved text:

Bin, inciting F requires a speed of just 426.831 meters per second. I’m very afraid.

“I know that handwriting!” Lin Yun said, staring at the words. On more than one occasion, she had read Zhang Bin’s notebook, its alternating pages burned by ball lightning.

“Yes. It’s Zheng Min.”

“What did she carve?”

“A mathematical model. A complete description of macro-atoms.”

Lin Yun sighed. “We really should have brought a digital camera.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ve got it all in my head.”

“You do? All of it?”

“Most of it I’d derived already. But my theoretical system was stuck on a few points that she cleared up.”

“It must be a very important breakthrough!”

“Not just that. Lin Yun, we can find macro-nuclei!”

“The nuclei of macro-atoms?”

“Yes. By observing the movement of a macro-electron in space, we can use this model to precisely determine the exact location of the macro-atom it belongs to.”

“But how can we detect those macro-nuclei?”

“The same as with macro-electrons, and just as surprisingly simple: we can see them with the naked eye.”

“Wow...?what do they look like? I remember you said that the shape of macro-nuclei would be completely different from the shape of macro-electrons.”

“Strings.”

“Strings?”

“Yes, strings. They look like a length of string.”

“How long? How thick?”

“They’re in basically the same class as macro-electrons. They’re about one to two meters long, depending on the atom. And they’re infinitely thin. Every point is a dimensionless singularity.”

“How can we see an infinitely thin string with the naked eye?”

“Because light bends in its vicinity.”

“So what does it look like?”

Ding Yi half closed his eyes, like someone who has just woken up attempting to recall a dream. “It’ll look like...?a transparent crystalline snake. Or a hanging-proof rope.”

“That second one’s a strange analogy.”

“That’s because the string is the smallest building block of macro-matter. It’s impossible for it to be cut.”

On the way back, Lin Yun said to Ding Yi, “One more question: You’re the cutting edge of theoretical physics in this country. It’s hard to believe that decades ago, another ball lightning researcher was as well. There’s certainly an element of subjectivity in Zhang Bin’s assessment of his wife, but was Zheng Min really capable of making those discoveries?”

“If humanity lived in a frictionless world, Newton’s Three Laws might have been discovered even earlier by someone even more ordinary. When you yourself become a macro-particle in a quantum state, you might have a far easier time understanding that world than we do.”

*

And so the base started working on collecting macro-atomic nuclei.

They began by using the bubble optical detection system to make precise observations of the free-motion state of macro-electrons in the air, understanding now that the complicated floating path followed by a macro-electron, or the ball lightning that resulted when it was excited, was in fact an endless succession of atomic electron transitions—quantum leaps—that appear to us like continuous motion. If that macro-electron did indeed belong to a macro-atom, the magnificent mathematical model that had appeared on Zhang Bin’s gravestone could determine the position of a macro-atom’s nucleus through a complicated calculation involving various parameters of the atomic transition.

The first set of ten free-moving macro-electrons observed were discovered at a height of five hundred meters. A macro-electron had to be observed continuously for half an hour to obtain enough raw data for the calculation. The results showed that, of those ten macro-electrons, two were free electrons, and the other eight each belonged to a different macro-atomic nucleus, between three hundred and six hundred kilometers away. This was very close to Ding Yi’s initial estimate of the size of macro-electrons. Three of the nuclei were beyond the atmosphere in space, one was deep in the Earth’s crust, and of the four in the atmosphere, two were outside the country. So the researchers set off in search of one of the in-country macro-atomic nuclei, which was 534 kilometers away from the observed macro-electron.

It was wartime, so it was impossible to requisition a helicopter, but fortunately the base had three helium blimps they had used for capturing macro-electrons. These were easy to use, and cheap to fly; their one flaw was that they moved very slowly, at maximum speed no better than a car on an expressway.