Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

I started counting angels on the tip of a pin again, but this time Lin Yun joined me in counting.

In the process of establishing mathematical models, I found that Lin Yun's mathematical ability is not as good as mine, but she has a wide range of knowledge and has quite deep atments in many sciences, which is required by her major. She is very good at computer. Mathematical models are programmed by her hands. Her program has the visual result output, if the model mathematically is successful, the screen will appear a three-dimensional ball lightning, its internal fine structure lies, it disappeared when the energy release process in slow motion performance is clear, in a picture can also be observed in a three-dimensional coordinate system its trajectory. This was far more than a matter of intuition and aesthetics, compared with the dry tables and curves my previous programs produced: the data used to come out and require time-consuming and tedious procedures to know if the model was successful, but now the computer does all that automatically. This software has revolutionized our theoretical understanding of ball lightning.

There are countless mathematical models of ball lightning. It's like writing a thesis. You just have to build a system that complies with the laws of physics and is mathematically autonomous, so that the energy constrained by the electromagnetic force forms a stable ball and satisfies the hitherto known properties of ball lightning. But it's not easy to do that, because one astronomer said it's very interesting that stars, if they don't exist, would be easy to prove that they can't exist. The same could be said of ball lightning, where the idea of a mechanism to trap electromagnetic waves traveling at the speed of light in such a small ball would be mind-boggling.

But with enough patience and fanaticism, such models of writing can be built. Whether they will stand up to the test of experiment is another matter, and I'm almost sure they won't. The several mathematical models we have developed show only partial mathematical characteristics of ball lightning, some of which may fail in one model and easily show up in another, but none of which represents all known characteristics.

In addition to the aforementioned trapped electromagnetic waves, one of the most mysterious properties of ball lightning is its selectivity in releasing energy. In computers, the virtual ball lightning created by the student model works like a bomb, incinerating everything around it when it hits objects or releases its own energy. Every time I see these, I think of the charred books in the intact shelves, the cooked seafood in the equally intact refrigerator, the charred underwear clinging to my body under the intact jacket, the cold stool my parents sat on before they were incinerated... But what stands out most in my memory is the charred notebook Chang showed me, the most arrogant manifestation of some mysterious force that relentlessly destroys our confidence.

I spent most of my time at the Thunder Institute, but sometimes I went to new Concepts.

Most of Lin Yun's colleagues and friends are male soldiers, and EVEN in her spare time, I rarely see her having female friends. The young officers, who belong to the rapidly expanding upper intellectual class of the present army, have a masculinity rarely seen in society. This makes me always have a sense of inferiority in front of them, especially when Lin Yun and they are very invested in discussing the military professional I know nothing about, this sense of inferiority is more intense. The navy captain in the photo on Lin Yun's desk is one of them.

I saw Colonel Jiang Xingxing, which shows that Lin Yun knew him for a long time. He looked younger than his picture, in his thirties, which must have been unusual for such a young colonel.

"Jiang Xingxing, captain of the Mount Everest." Lin yun introduced me to the fact that she called him by his first name and the fleeting glance they exchanged confirmed their relationship.

"Dr. Chen, Lin Yun has told me many times about you and your ball lightning." He looked me straight in the eye as he spoke, and there was a sincerity in his eyes that made me feel comfortable, unlike what I had imagined an aircraft carrier captain to be.

The first time I saw Jiang Xingxing, I knew there was no point in competing with him. And now used to aggressive shows strength in the presence of potential competitors urban men, on the other hand, every time he thought hard to hide his own strength, this is a kind of goodwill, afraid of hurting people like me, and he seemed always to say: I'm really sorry, make you feel inferior in front of her, this is not on purpose, let us work together to change this situation.

"For your aircraft carrier, we have to pay an average tax of 10 yuan per civilian." I tried to lighten up, awkwardly as I spoke.

"That doesn't include the aircraft and the cruisers that escort it, so it's like we carry it on our shoulders every time we go out." "He said seriously, and again managed to release my tension.

After seeing Jiang Xingxing, I was not depressed as I imagined, but relieved of some kind of heavy burden. Lin Yun has formed a beautiful little world in my mind. I appreciate that world and go there to rest when I am tired, but I am careful not to fall into it. Something separated our hearts, something unspeakable, but I knew it was there. To me, Lin Yun is like the miniature sword she wears on her chest, crystal beautiful but sharp and dangerous.

After building a few mathematical models, I started to get a feel for it. The new models more and more represented known features of ball lightning, but at the same time, the models became more and more computation-intensive, sometimes taking days to complete a simulation on my 3G P4 computer. Lin Yun developed a new concept by 18 machines to calculate separately, and finally summarized the results, greatly improving efficiency.

When I finally put together a mathematical model that represented all the known properties of ball lightning, what Lin Yun had long feared happened. This time, when she got the mathematical model, instead of programming it immediately, she spent days estimating its computational complexity and heaved a deep sigh when she got the results.

"We have a problem." "With the amount of computation in this model, it would take about half a million hours to complete a simulation on a single existing microcomputer," she said.

I was shocked. "This is... Over fifty years?"

"Yes. As a rule of thumb, each model needs to be debugged several times, possibly more depending on the complexity of the model, so we can tolerate less than 10 days for a simulation."

I estimated in my mind: "this needs nearly two thousand microcomputer calculation at the same time!"

So we started looking at mainframe computers, but it wasn't easy. Neither Thunderbolt nor New Concept had mainframes, and the largest machine was the ALPHA server. The use of military mainframes is busy and strictly restricted. Since our research has not been approved in the military, Lin Yun has not been approved to use it after repeated efforts. So we can only put the hope on the civilian large machine, I and Lin Yun in this respect have no access, can only let gao Bo think of a way.

Gao Bo was in a bad position. As soon as he took office, he transformed the institute from a public institution into an enterprise and put it on the market thoroughly. At the same time, a large number of staff were cut through competition for jobs. As a result of this person to do impulsive cautious insufficient, coupled with the lack of understanding of national conditions and practices, up and down the relationship made very tense.

Business failures are even worse: After he took office, he devoted the main force of the institute to the development of new lightning arrester and lightning elimination devices, which were very different from conventional lightning protection devices, including semiconductor arrester, optimized lightning rod, laser lightning diversion device, rocket lightning diversion device and water column lightning diversion device. At this moment in time for the Chinese institute of electrical engineering of high voltage of overvoltage and insulation coordination of academic conference, held thesis is new type of lightning and thunder device, meeting minutes published finally found, theory and practice has failed to prove this kind of product is better than conventional lightning proof device is superior performance, there are many problems remain to be research and solve, Therefore, such unconventional direct lightning protection products should not be used in engineering. Because of the authority and influence of the organization, the views of the conference must be adopted by the national lightning protection engineering specifications that are being formulated, so that the things being developed are completely lost to the market, and the huge investment is wasted. When I talk to takanami mainframes, and he is looking for me, let me put aside for a ball lightning research, focus on developing a new type of lightning location system for the use of electric power system, at the same time to complete the capital theatre of lightning protection engineering design, this natural no mainframe, even the ball lightning prognosis can only have amateur research itself.

Lin yun and I did some other visual experiments, but we didn't realize how rare mainframe computers were in an age when computers were a necessity.

"We were lucky," Lin said. "None of our calculations were really big compared to the supercomputing projects in the world today. I just read a document from the US Department of Energy's nuclear test simulation. Their existing 12 teraflops of computing power is no longer enough to simulate a nuclear test. They are currently building a cluster system with up to 12,000 ALPHAPOWERED processors. Up to 100 trillion calculations per second. Our calculations are still in the normal range and we should be able to find a solution."

Lin Yunzhong acted in the manner of a soldier, steadfastly moving forward no matter how big the difficulties were, while minimizing the pressure on me by downplaying them, which was what I should have done for her.

"Ball lightning is similar to nuclear testing in that it simulates energy evolution," I said. "In some ways, it's more complicated, so we'll get there sooner or later. But I don't see how we can solve it, even now."

In the following days, I concentrated on connecting the thunder positioning system handed over by Gao Bo, and did not contact Lin Yun. One day she received a phone call, she told me a website, let me see, tone is very excited.

I opened the page and saw that its background was the black of space, its title was the Earth floating in purple waves, and the page was called SETI@home, which stands for "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in your Home."

I had known about it all along, a giant experiment designed to harness the idle power of the thousands of computers connected to the Internet to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The SETI@home program is a special kind of screensaver that helps in the search for Extraterrestrial intelligence by analyzing data from Arecibo, the world's largest radio telescope. But when huge amounts of data are pouring in to search for the information needed, a supercomputer becomes necessary, and it costs a fortune to do so. Cash-strapped scientists came up with a quick fix: instead of one giant computer, more "smaller" computers should do the heavy lifting. Each day, Arecibo's incoming data is recorded on high-density digital tape and sent back to a research facility at the University of California, where it is broken down into 0.25 Megabyte "units of work" that are sent to individual PCS from the main server at SETI@home. All users around the world have to do is go to the project's site and download and install a special screen saver. So when people take a break from work, the screen saver starts running, and the seemingly resting computer has actually joined the search for aliens: Receive and analyze the data from SETI@home to be decomposed into "unit of work". After the analysis, the system will automatically online send the analysis results back to the main server, and then receive another "unit of work".

I downloaded a screensaver from the site and started it. It also has a black background, and the bottom half is a three-dimensional coordinate system of radio telescope signals. It looks like a bird's eye view of a supercity made up of countless skyscrapers. In the upper left corner, there is a rapidly changing waveform, which is the part of the signal that is being analyzed, and the percentage that has been done, and I see that it has been done for five minutes, and it's only done 0.01%.

"Wonderful! I was so impressed that the others in the office looked at me in surprise. I am ashamed of myself that scientists over there, with more money than ours, have come up with such creative frugality when faced with the same problem as ours. I immediately go to the new concept, when I see the computer before Lin Yun, as expected, she is doing a home page.

The next thing to do was to divide the mathematical model that needed to be calculated into 2000 parallel computing units, which was a heavy task that we worked on for half a month. The network programming is more complicated than SETI@home because the cells have to pass data between them. Finally we uploaded the homepage and waited hopefully for the results.

Three days later, we found ourselves a little too optimistic. Fewer than 50 people visited the page and only four downloaded the screensaver. There were two comments on the message board, all of them sanctimonious warnings against pseudoscience.

"There's only one way." "It's not hard to hack into their server by uploading the data we need to calculate to SETI@home, so that a large number of computers that downloaded their screensaver program will do the work for us and be programmed to send the results to us," Lin said.

I don't object, I find, but how weak the moral constraints are when you desire something. But I came up with an excuse: "There are more than 100,000 computers working for them right now. We only need 2,000 of them. We'll just leave and it won't make any difference to them."

In fact, Lin Yun does not need to comfort myself like me at all, she connected the computer to the Internet, quickly dry up. Looking at her, I couldn't imagine what she had done online before. Two days later, she managed to put our data and programs on a server at SETI@home (which, it turned out, was at Berkeley).

I learned from this that Lin Yun's moral constraints were much less than mine, and she would do anything to achieve her goal.

Only two days later, we in the seti@home server two thousand screensavers are removed, the calculation results to continuously to our server, to a few days, I and Lin Yun often look at the computer for hours on the increasing of data, imagine the spread of two thousand computers work for us on earth, is intoxicated.

But on the eighth day, I turned on my computer at the Thunder house and logged on to the new Concept server, only to find that the return of my calculations had stopped. Finally, I received a text file that read as follows:

You should be ashamed of yourself for being so shamefully harassed while we are doing the greatest human cause with the most meagre funds!

-- NORTON Parker, project director, SETI@home