Ball Lightning

The task force consisted of about a dozen people divided into five teams distributed over a large area, with several hundred kilometers between them. The group I was in had three members apart from the driver and experimental assistants: myself, Zhang Bin, and a grad student named Zhao Yu. When we reached our zone, we roomed at the county-level meteorological station.

The weather was quite good the next morning, so we could start our first day of field work. As we were moving the instruments and equipment out to the car from the room we were using as temporary storage, I asked, “Professor Zhang, what are some good ways for exploring the internal structure of lightning?”

He peered at me intently for a moment, as if aware of what I was thinking. “Judging from the current needs of domestic engineering projects, research on the lightning structure is not a priority. The priority right now is large-scale statistical research.” Whenever I brought up anything even remotely related to ball lightning, he dodged the question. Evidently the man genuinely detested everything that lacked practical value.

But Zhao Yu answered my question: “There aren’t many. Right now, we can’t even directly measure its voltage. We have to calculate indirectly from measurements of the current. The most common instrument for studying the structure of lightning is, well, this.” He pointed to a tubular object sitting in one corner of the storeroom. “This is a magnetic steel recorder, and it’s used to record the amplitude and polarity of the lightning current. The material it’s constructed from has a relatively high residual magnetism, and when the inside lead comes into contact with lightning, you can calculate its amplitude and polarity from the residual magnetism left on the device. This one’s 60Si2Mn spring steel, but there are also plastic tubes, blade-core, and iron-powder types.”

“And we’ll be using it?”

“Of course. Why else would we bring it? But that’s for later on.”

The first stage of our mission was to install a lightning positioning system in the monitoring zone to aggregate signals from a large number of scattered lightning sensors and feed them into a computer that would automatically generate statistics of the number, frequency, and distribution of lightning strikes. It was really only a counting and positioning system and did not involve any physical data, so I was not interested at all. Most of the work consisted of setting up the outdoor sensors, and that was not easy. If we were lucky, we could mount the sensors on electrical poles or transmission towers, but most of the time we had to erect poles ourselves. After a few days, the experimental assistants were complaining incessantly.

Nothing interested Zhao Yu, least of all his major. At work, he constantly procrastinated, and seized every chance he could to slack off. At first he was full of praise for the tropical forest environs, but when the novelty wore off, he seemed dispirited. Still, he was easy to get along with, and we ended up talking quite a bit.

Every evening when we returned to town, Zhang Bin always went back to his room to bury his head in that day’s materials, so Zhao Yu took the opportunity to drag me off for a drink on one of the rustic streets. The electricity was usually off on that street, and the candles that flickered in the wooden buildings took me back to an age before atmospherics, before physics, before even science itself, so that I could forget reality for a moment. One day, as we sat, slightly tipsy, in a small candlelit inn, he said, “The people in the forest would have a wonderful explanation for you if they ever saw your ball lightning.”

“I’ve asked the locals,” I said. “They’ve been aware of it for a long time, and they already have an explanation. Ghost lanterns.”

“Isn’t that enough?” he said, unfolding his fingers. “It’s beautiful. All your plasmas and vector-soliton resonators may not be able to tell you anything more than that. Modernity is complex, and I don’t like complexity.”

I snorted. “Look at you and your attitude. Professor Zhang’s the only one who’ll tolerate you.”

“Don’t talk to me about Zhang Bin,” Zhao Yu said with a drunken wave. “He’s the sort of person who, if he drops his keys, won’t look for them in the place the sound came from. Instead, he’ll get a piece of chalk and divide the room into a grid and then search section by section….”

We broke down into fits of laughter.

“People like him are suited only to the sort of work that will be done entirely by machines in the future. Creativity and imagination have no meaning for them, and they employ rigor and discipline in their scholarship to cover up their mediocrity. You know the universities are full of them. Still, with enough time, you can find things going section by section, so they manage to do well in their field.”

“And what has Zhang found?”