Ball Lightning(91)
Skies were blue in northern China that day, an excellent time for capture. They flew westward for more than four hours, crossing the Shanxi border. Below them was the unbroken line of the Taihang Mountains. The position of macro-nuclei was relatively constant compared to macro-electrons, but they still moved slowly, meaning the base had to continuously monitor the macro-electron and notify the capture blimp of the latest calculations of the macro-nucleus position. After the observation team on base notified the blimp that it had reached the target’s location, the aviators turned on the blimp’s optical detection system, whose pattern recognition software had been modified to detect a length of string rather than a round shape. There was a roughly one-hundred-meter margin of error for locating the macro-nucleus, so the optical detection system carried out fine observations of that area of sky to quickly locate the target.
The blimp descended slightly, and the aviator said that the target was several meters off the front left side of the cabin.
“Maybe we can see it directly!” Ding Yi said. Macro-electrons were hard to see without particularly keen eyesight, but Ding Yi had predicted that the shape of macro-nuclei was clearer to the naked eye, and their movement was slower and more regular, so they could be tracked more easily.
“It’s over there,” the aviator said, pointing down and to the left. All they could see in that direction was a rolling mountain range.
“Can you see it?” Lin Yun asked.
“No. That’s based on the data,” the pilot said, pointing at the detection system’s screen.
“Take us down a bit more, so we can use the sky as a background,” Ding Yi said to him.
The blimp descended slightly. The aviator watched the screen as he worked, and soon the blimp came to a standstill again. He pointed up and to the right. “It’s over there....” But this time, he didn’t pull his hand back. “My God! There really is something! Look over there! It’s moving upward!”
And thus, after the discovery of the macro-electron, humanity saw a macro-atomic nucleus for the first time.
The string was indistinct against the background of the blue sky. Like the bubbles, it was transparent, with a shape formed from its refraction of the light around it. Motionless, it would be invisible to the naked eye, but the string bent and contorted continuously in the air in a strange dance, unpredictable, but full of a wild vitality that exerted a strong attraction and hypnotic power on the observer. Later, theoretical physicists gave it a poetic name: “stringdance.”
“What are you thinking?” Ding Yi asked, without taking his eyes off the macro-nucleus.
“It’s not a crystalline snake or a hanging-proof rope,” Lin Yun answered. “It reminds me of Shiva, the eternally dancing god of Hinduism. When her dance stops, the world will be destroyed with a bang.”
“Brilliant! You seem to have found a sensitivity for abstract beauty.”
“I’ve lost my focus on the beauty of weapons. An emptiness needs to be filled with some other sort of feeling.”
“You’ll refocus on weapons soon enough.”
At Ding Yi’s statement, Lin Yun turned away from the macro-nucleus outside the cabin to look at him in wonder. Until that point, she had not connected the string dancing in midair to weapons.
When she turned back to look at the macro-nucleus, finding it again took a lot of effort. It was hard to imagine that the dancing transparent string and the far-off crystalline bubble formed an atom with a radius of more than five hundred kilometers. How big would a macro-universe formed from those atoms be? The mere thought was enough to drive you crazy.
Capturing macro-nuclei worked similarly to capturing macro-electrons. Since the protons in a macro-nucleus bore a positive charge, they were attracted to magnetic fields. But unlike macro-electrons, they would not flow through superconducting wires. The blimp hatch opened, and a feeler with a powerful electromagnetic coil attached to its end gingerly extended toward the string. The balancing presence of the macro-electrons gave the macro-atom itself a neutral charge, but the blimp was now deep inside it, near the unneutralized nucleus. When the coil at the tip of the feeler neared the string, the rhythm of its dancing slowed. It rotated once, bringing one end into contact with the coil, as if it knew which end was supposed to be connected. Then it continued its senseless dance, only fixed in place this time.
Lin Yun and Ding Yi carefully drew the feeler back into the cabin. It’s a little like fishing, they thought. The string danced in the cabin. It was around one meter long, and looked like a shimmer of hot air on the summer blacktop, rendering the cabin wall behind it slightly wavy. Lin Yun reached out to it, but, like the helicopter pilot who paused before the first macro-electron, she stopped, then watched uncomfortably as Ding Yi passed his hand casually across the center of the string without affecting its dance in the slightest.
“No big deal. It doesn’t have any interaction with the physical matter of our world.” Then, after staring at the string with Lin Yun for a minute, Ding Yi let out a long sigh. “Frightening. A terror of the natural world.”
Lin Yun asked, “It can’t be excited like macro-electrons, so what’s so terrible about it? It looks like the most harmless thing in the world.”
Ding Yi sighed again, and then stepped away, seeming to leave behind the unspoken words, Just you wait.
*
It wasn’t long before the detection team at the base located another macro-nucleus three-hundred-odd kilometers away from the blimp. They continued on, and three hours later, in the sky over Hengshui, Hebei Province, captured their second macro-nucleus. Another three were located in quick succession, the farthest some four hundred kilometers away, the nearest just over one hundred. The problem was that the blimp was only equipped with two magnetic coils, each of which had a string stuck to it. Lin Yun suggested that they stick two to a single coil, and use the other coil to capture new strings.