The responsibilities of a scholar: Ball Lightning, by Cixin Liu

 It was with some trepidation that I read Ball Lightning.  If Liu's name sounds familiar, he wrote the Three Body Problem trilogy.  I've heard something about a tv series, or something?  I dunno.  Does tv still exist?  Anyway, the first book in that series is absolutely amazing.  All-time classic, must-read, stop everything right now (except your school work, and even then, a case could be made...).  The premise is that physics experiments stop working.  Why?  Aliens are fucking with us, as a prelude to an invasion.  They're traveling at sub-light speed, so we have time to prepare, but there are traitors among us, paving the way for them.  It's really cool.

The second book had some fascinating ideas, and a really cool main character, but a lot of tangents, and lack of focus.  That book-- The Dark Forest-- was well worth reading, but it did not quite live up to the first book.  Still, you should read it.  It has one of the better ideas in science fiction addressing the Fermi paradox.  Why don't we see/hear alien civilizations?  They stay quiet because any known civilization is a potential threat.  Make a sound, get destroyed.  That's why we don't hear from them.  Why are the aliens coming for us?  We were stupid enough to make a sound.  There are problems in the book, and some problems in how the game theoretic analysis is conducted, but it's still a very cool book.

The final book in the series, Death's End, was terrible.  It did not quite reach levels of wretchedness that cause me to put a book down-- a thing that happens very rarely-- but it was really bad.  The main character is pointless, stupid and annoying, the plot meanders, the math is riddled with errors, and everything is ultimately pointless.  Add a heaping dollop of misogyny and that's a big, ole' nope for me.  Bad book, bad book.

So given that, I took some time before getting around to Ball Lightning, which was actually written in 2004, but the English translation didn't come out until 2018.  And you know what?  It's actually a good book.  He still screwed up the math.  He screwed up the game theory, and he screwed up the physics, and I'll grumble about that, but there are some interesting ideas here.

OK, so here's what's happening.  The novel follows Chen, who sees his parents killed by ball lightning as a kid, and becomes obsessed with the phenomenon.  He goes off to college and grad school to study it, eventually drawn into China's special weapons program, which looks for weirdo, wacko ideas for turning anything into a weapon.  Because hey, if we can turn ball lightning into some kind of a weapon, why not?

He is drawn into the program by Lin Yun, the sociopathic nutjob running the show, who is officially a Major, but seems to have power above her rank, partially because of the connections she has from her father, who is a General.  But, she's wacko.  She is an engineering prodigy, but she puts her mind to use mostly for the sake of psychopathic imagination.  As Chen and Lin Yun start to work through the problems of ball lightning, they recruit the smartest physicist in China, Ding Yi, who figures out what it really is.

It's a giant electron.  (Which would mean there are giant protons and neutrons, right?  Yup.  That'd mean other stuff, right?  Yup.)

So why does ball lightning pop into existence?  Electrons obey quantum mechanical principles, bouncin' 'round the cloud in ways that Liu misunderstands.  Still, it's an interesting gimmick for a novel.  And it allows the weaponization of ball lightning, once the group figures out how to manipulate the little buggers.

Some burn living tissue, some boil away water, some zap silicon chips... they have specific properties.  Whatever.  Sci-fi.  Anyway, they figure out how to weaponize ball lightning, as war starts brewing between the U.S. and China.

As this happens, Chen starts to recoil from seeing the weaponization of ball lightning, so he wants to do something without military potential.  He has been studying atmospheric stuff, so he shifts specialization.  One of the things that he had to build along the way was a device to look for atmospheric anomalies, and he takes that device and the program to look for tornadoes before they form, as an early warning system.  Hey, no military applications there!  We can just give people early warning that tornadoes are coming, get to safety, save some lives, and do good like some do-gooders.  Right?

So Chen does this, and finds himself at a conference in Oklahoma before all-out-war breaks out, and an atmospheric scientist in the US basically gives him the wink-wink in a sorry way.  Why?  Because the premise here is that anything can be weaponized.  There's nothing a scientist can do that cannot be weaponized.

To the degree that the novel has a thesis, that's it.  All science can be weaponized.

So what happens?  War breaks out, and the American fleet heads for China.  They wipe out China's navy with science fictionally created tornadoes, using Chen's math, and have already figured out a defense against Lin Yun's ball lightning weapons.  China's gettin' their asses handed to them.

Resolution?  Well, you know how ball lightning is supposedly just a macro-electron?  That means macro-neutrons too.  What happens if you ram one macro-neutron into another?  Macro... fusion.  Which doesn't do quite the same thing as normal fusion, but is still scary.

Ball lightning reactions can, if you use the right macro-electrons, wipe out computer chips.  So use the right macro-neutrons, and you wipe out all computer chips in a huge radius, sending everyone back to a pre-computer era.  China has a big weapon.  Lin Yun sets off one of these devices, not with a plan, but just because she's a fucking psycho, and she can't resist playing with a weapon.

America sees the result, even though it was set off on Chinese soil, sending a bunch of China back to the pre-computer era, and treats it like Hiroshima & Nagasaki.  War ends.

So as I must, before the good stuff, grumbling must happen.  First, physics.  Quantum mechanics are not magic, and Schrodinger's cat is not an excuse for bullshit.  In Neal Stephenson's The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., there was a great scene in which a military officer with a physics background, Tristan, goes on a very pedantic lecture about Schrodinger's cat to a linguistics professor, Melisande.  She actually just gets really annoyed with him, and tries to explain to him that yes, she knows, and in fact, everyone knows.  It isn't some obscure thing.  It's kind of a joke about how overused Schrodinger's cat is as a reference.  And yet...

OK, just in case there are any misunderstandings, here's how it works.  The location of a subatomic particle is indeterminate.  It is a "wave form," which means that there is some probability that it exists in various locations.  If we conduct an experiment, and the results of the experiment depend on a specific location, the wave form "collapses," but otherwise, the particle exists in a wave form.  Schrodinger proposes the following thought experiment.  Take a cat, and stick it in a box with a decaying radioactive isotope, a vial of poison gas, and a Geiger counter hooked up to a hammer triggered to break the vial when enough radiation is detected.  Close the box.  At any given point in time, there is some probability that the neutrons have hit the Geiger counter, and some probability that they haven't.  Why?  Wave form.  Therefore, there is some probability that the hammer has been brought down, and some probability that it hasn't, therefore some probability that the glass has been broken, and some probability that it hasn't, therefore some probability that the poison has been released and some probability that it hasn't, and therefore some probability that the cat is alive and some probability that the cat is dead, and all of these instances exist in the same "wave forms" as the neutrons as long as the box is closed because subatomic particles do not exist in one definite location at one time.  The thought experiment ties the live/dead state of the cat to the indefinite location of a subatomic particle.  That's the key.

Got it?

OK, so Liu goes on all this bullshit about "observing" ball lightning, and such.  OK, observing it collapses the wave form, you can say that.  I'll give you that.  But here's the thing.  If you are observing ball lighting, its wave form has collapsed.  It's location (and velocity!) are what you observe it to be.  We could actually do a whole, big thing about what observation means in physics, but let's skip that for now.  I got more to say.  Point being, when you see ball lightning, you see a collapsed wave form.

Liu is partially consistent on this.  He thinks humans are magic in terms of what observation means (cameras also count), but here's where it goes off the fuckin' rails.  If ball lightning kills you, are you dead?

Yes.  Yes, you are.

But here's the story he wants to tell.  Instead of dying, you become a "quantum" person.  You're like Miracle Max says, only mostly dead, but partly alive, and ready to storm the castle.  Sure, you may have been reduced to a pile of ash, but there's a secret you running around in a parallel universe that can still somehow interact with this universe, heard but not seen, because if you're seen, then your wave form collapses, and always to the dead state, and...

Oh my fucking god, put down those dice, no.  That ball lightning that you observed?  That Chen observed when he watched it kill his parents?  It had been observed.  Not just by Chen's parents as thinking-outside-the-catbox-kitties, but by Chen.  Its wave form had already collapsed.  Then it killed them.  If ball lightning kills you, it does not transform you into a quantum you.  You just got zapped into a zapp-ified you.  Not a Zappa-fied you, where you have cool facial hair and an under-appreciated ability to play guitar.  No, you're just a pile of ash.  Not "Ash," where you get cool one liners, like, "good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun."  No, just dead.  Not "deadite," but dead.

Seriously.  I would like Tristan from The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. to zap from that novel either into real life to give a pedantic explanation to Liu, or perhaps just Ding Yi, and every other character in Ball Lightning, oy.

More grumbling, because I gotta.  Liu fucks up the game theory.  OK, so there's a war between the U.S. and China.

Funny time to think about this, right?  There will not be a shooting war between the U.S. and Russia.  This will not happen.  Why not?  Nukes.  Um... you know who else has nukes?

China.

There will never be a shooting war between the U.S. and China.

Liu asserts, within the novel, that nukes cannot prevent a shooting war because nobody can ever fire the first nuke.  OK, I suppose this would seem like a novel (ha!) observation to someone who doesn't study game theory, but dude.  Thomas Schelling won the Nobel for this, and you see me reference the book all the time.  The Strategy of Conflict.  Schelling wrote about how nuclear weapons can prevent a hot war between nuclear armed powers, even though it is a strategic mistake to fire the first nuke.  That was the point.  Any escalating conflict increases the probability that someone will make a mistake, and in order to avoid the resulting disaster, the shooting war doesn't happen.  I write about Schelling enough that I won't do another long form rant here, but... come on.

And the thing is, Liu has a history of messing up the math.  In Death's End, one of the premises was a weapon that collapses dimensionality while preserving information, which is mathematically impossible.  If you understand what dimensionality means in linear algebra terms, you understand that the entire premise of the weapon at the heart of the novel makes no sense.  Go take linear algebra.  Not "algebra" from middle school, and stuff about lines.  I mean the class you take in college after a few semesters of calculus.  Different thing.  If you know what an eigenvector is, you took it.  If you have no clue what an eigenvector is, then no, you don't know what linear algebra is.  And neither does Liu.

OK, that's enough grumbling.  Granted, that was a lot of grumbling, and it gives you the impression that I did not like the novel, but really, there was a lot of interesting stuff here.  Let's skip over the misunderstandings of quantum mechanics and game theory and all that, and get to the thesis.

All science can be weaponized.

Is it true?  Can I conceive of science beyond the potential for weaponization?  Well, let me put it this way.  I study democracy.  Can that be weaponized?  Yes.  It can be weaponized by an anti-democratic, autocratic party, movement or person against the politics that I would advocate.  If I observe that Method A for running an election produces democratic responsiveness, which I think is generally a good thing, then an autocrat would observe that and decide that Method A should be avoided.  I'm just a political scientist, and yet even the kind of shit that I do is open to weaponization.  To be sure, nobody gives a shit what I say or do, but I do work in a field that actually can be weaponized.  That doesn't kill people, not directly anyway, but turned to evil?  Yup.

Ball Lightning gives us three characters, Chen, Lin Yun and Ding Yi.  Chen is intellectually curious but does not want his work turned to harm.  Ding Yi is a pure intellectual.  He doesn't care about people, one way or another.  He just cares about solving physics problems.  Lin Yun is fascinated by weapons because she wants to find new and creative ways to kill.  Three different ways of thinking, all presented within the thesis that any innovation can be turned to kill.  Ding Yi absolves himself of any responsibility by not accepting any, and Lin Yun is fucking terrifying.

For anyone with both a conscience and curiosity, the challenge is Chen's perspective.  He wants to learn, and to study, but he doesn't want the results of his studying to be turned to destruction.  The novel presents the case that someone can always do so, and within the history of technology, the greatest innovations have come from governmental/military collaborations.  Hey, I'm writing over the internet.  DARPA, right?

At the end of the novel, after Lin Yun sets off the macro-fusion nukey-thing, much of China is set back before the computer age, and Chen actually seems happier with his non-character wife in a "simpler time."  Oy.  That's not the kind of answer that will satisfy everyone.  Doesn't satisfy me.  You don't have to be Lin Yun, nor even as amoral as Ding Yi to assert that there is value in discovery, yet to be as unconcerned with consequence as Ding Yi is hardly appealing, even if Chen's decision to remove himself, futilely, from anything he thinks might have military application winds up first creating a devastating if batshit weapon, and then just sending him spiraling.  So to speak.

And so I turn to Steven Pinker.  For all the bemoaning of technological consequences-- and I do plenty of that-- by any quantitative measure, life is better now.  Does that validate Ding Yi's perspective?  Perhaps not, but it might mean Chen should quit hiding.

There's really only one song for today.  Sure, I could have gone with Smokestack Lightning, or a few other semi-obvious choices, but c'mon.  Richard Thompson, "1952 Vincent Black Lightning."  Here's a live version, of course.