“Research on what?”
“Ball lightning.”
“Great. If they’ve sent you here to insult me, then they’ve succeeded.”
“Why don’t you listen to our explanation before forming a conclusion? Maybe you’ll be able to use this to insult them,” Lin Yun said, opening up the laptop she had brought. She played a recording of the excitation of ball lightning, and explained it briefly to Ding Yi.
“So you’re saying that you’re using lightning to excite some undiscovered structure in the air?” Ding Yi said, staring at the ball lightning floating faintly on the laptop screen.
Lin Yun affirmed that that was the case. I showed Ding Yi Zhang Bin’s notebook with the alternating burnt pages and described its provenance. He took it and looked it over closely and carefully before returning it to me.
He took a bunch of tobacco from the glass, stuffed it into a large pipe, and lit it. He pointed at the loose cigarettes and said, “Take care of those for me.” Then he walked over to a wall and began to smoke. And so we extracted the tobacco from the cigarettes and put it into the glass.
“I know a place that sells pipe tobacco,” I said, looking up at him.
He didn’t seem to hear me, but stood there exhaling smoke. His face was practically pressed against the wall, so that the smoke he blew against it seemed to be issuing from the wall instead. His eyes were focused on the distance, as if the wall was the transparent border of another vast world and he was surveying the profound sights it held.
Before long, he finished his pipe, but maintained his posture against the wall. He said, “I’m not as self-righteous as you might imagine. The first task is to prove that I’m qualified for this project. If I’m not, then you can find someone else.”
“So you’ll join us?”
Ding Yi turned back around. “Yes. Why don’t I go with you now?”
That night, quite a few people at the base found it hard to sleep. From time to time they looked out the window at the tiny red star that flashed intermittently on the broad lightning test ground. That was Ding Yi’s pipe.
After arriving at the base, Ding Yi looked briefly through the materials we had prepared, and then immediately began calculating. He didn’t use a computer, but worked quickly with pencil and paper, and before long the office prepared for him was as covered in paper as his home. He did calculations for two hours straight before stopping, and then moved his chair to the edge of the test ground, smoking his pipe constantly. Its flame, flickering like the summer fireflies, was the light of hope for ball lightning research.
The flame had a hypnotic effect that made me drowsy watching it, so I went to bed. When I woke up, it was two in the morning, and, looking through the window, I could see the tiny star still flashing on the test ground. Now, though, it was moving like a firefly. Ding Yi was pacing. I watched him for a while and then went back to sleep. It was daylight when I awoke, and the test ground was empty. Ding Yi had gone to sleep.
It was almost ten when he got up and declared to us the results of his thinking: “Ball lightning is visible.”
We looked at each other with forced smiles. “Professor Ding, you’re not just… bullshitting us, are you?”
“I mean, unexcited ball lightning. What you called the already existing structure. It’s visible. It causes light to bend.”
“…How do you see it?”
“According to my calculations of the light bend, it should be visible to the naked eye.”
We looked at each other uncertainly. “So… what does it look like?”
“A transparent sphere. It exhibits a round edge due to the bending of light. It looks like a soap bubble, although it lacks a bubble’s iridescence, so overall it is not as conspicuous. But it is definitely visible.”
“But why hasn’t anyone seen it before?”
“Because no one was looking.”
“How is that possible? In the whole of human history, think of how many of these bubbles have been floating in the air. And no one saw them?”
“Can you see the moon during the day?” Ding Yi asked.
“Of course not,” someone said reflexively.
Ding Yi pulled back the curtain on a crystal clear sky. There in the azure was a crescent moon, snow-white and stunning against the sky, looking conspicuously spherical.
“I’ve never noticed it before!” the speaker exclaimed.
“Someone did a survey showing that ninety percent of people have never noticed it, but it has often appeared during daytime throughout human history. Do you really expect people to notice a small, indistinct bubble found only once in several cubic kilometers, or maybe even an order of magnitude less than that?”
“That is a little hard to believe.”
“So let’s prove it. Let’s excite a few more thunderballs, and we’ll see.”
Empty Bubbles
That afternoon, the aircraft that had been grounded for several days took flight once again. They ignited the arc at three thousand meters and excited ball lightning three times. Seven people, including Lin Yun and me, were in the helicopters watching the thunderballs through binoculars until they vanished, but none of us saw the unexcited form.
“Your eyesight isn’t good enough,” Ding Yi said, after learning the results.
“Captain Liu and I didn’t see anything either,” said Captain Zheng, one of the helicopter pilots.
“Then you need better eyesight.”
“What? We’ve got perfect vision. You can’t find anyone with better eyesight!” Captain Liu, the other helicopter pilot, said.
“Then excite a few more and look more carefully,” Ding Yi said, unconvinced.
“Professor Ding, exciting thunderballs is very dangerous. We’ve got to be cautious,” Colonel Xu said.
“I think we should do as Professor Ding says and try once more. Sometimes risks have to be taken,” Lin Yun said.
In the less than two days that Ding Yi had been at the base, Lin Yun’s attitude toward him had experienced a conspicuous transformation, from initial suspicion to respect, a respect that I had not noticed her showing toward any other individual. After the meeting, I mentioned this to her.
She said, “Ding Yi has lots of ideas. He’s contemplating ball lightning on a level far beyond our reach.”
“So far I haven’t seen any impressive ideas from him.”
“It’s not something I’ve seen. It’s a feeling I have.”
“But his abstruse enigmas are supposed to solve our problems? And his practically pathological stubbornness? I dislike it.”
“Ball lightning itself is an abstruse enigma.”
And so the next morning another three hours of exciting flight were undertaken. Two thunderballs were excited, but the results were the same as the previous day’s. Once they disappeared, there was nothing to be seen.
“I still think you need better eyesight. Could we bring in a few more senior aviators, the kind that fly aircraft with wings?” Ding Yi said.
His question angered the helicopter pilots. Captain Zheng barked, “They’re called fighter pilots. And you listen here, the air force and army aviation each have their strengths. One’s not higher or lower than the other. And as far as eyesight goes, our requirements are the same as theirs!”
Ding Yi chuckled. “I’m not interested in military issues. Even so, it’s got to be because of the distance from the target. No one would be able to see a thunderball at that distance.”
“I’m certain that no one could see it from even closer!”
“That is a possibility. It’s a transparent bubble, after all. For a target like that, conditions are quite poor for airborne observations. What we need to do is take it back and observe it on the table.”