Ball Lightning Quotes

“First I’ll tell you about the picture of the universe painted by modern physics: the geometry of the universe is not physical.” “Can you be a little less abstract?” “What if I put it this way: in the universe, apart from empty space, there is nothing.”
― Liu Cixin, Ball Lightning

“From a physics perspective, the form of matter movement known as life has no more meaning than any other movement of matter. You can’t find any new physical laws in life, so from my standpoint, the death of a person and the melting of an ice cube are essentially the same thing. Dr. Chen, you tend to overthink things. You should learn to look at life from the perspective of the ultimate law of the universe. You’ll feel much better if you do.”
― Liu Cixin, Ball Lightning

“Those whose courses are different cannot lay plans for one another.”
― Liu Cixin, Ball Lightning

“I realized that beauty for most people is characterized by fragility and powerlessness. True beauty needs to be supported by an internal strength, and develop itself through sensations like terror and brutality, from which you can both draw strength and meet your death. In weapons, this beauty is expressed to the full.”
― Cixin Liu, Ball Lightning

“I am Ding Yi.” He opened up two folding chairs and motioned for us to sit down, then returned to his chair. He said, “Before you tell me why you’ve come, let me discuss with you a dream I’ve just had.… No, you’ve got to listen. It was a wonderful dream, which you interrupted. In the dream I was sitting here, a knife in my hand, around so long, like for cutting watermelon. Next to me was this tea table. But there wasn’t an ashtray or anything on it. Just two round objects, yea big. Circular, spherical. What do you think they were?” “Watermelon?” “No, no. One was a proton, the other a neutron. A watermelon-sized proton and neutron. I cut the proton open first. Its charge flowed out onto the table, all sticky, with a fresh fragrance. After I cut the proton in half, the quarks inside tumbled out, tinkling. They were about the size of walnuts, in all sorts of colors. They rolled about on the table, and some of them fell onto the floor. I picked up a white one. It was very hard, but with effort, I was able to bite into it. It tasted like a manaizi grape.… And right then, you woke me up.”
― Liu Cixin, Ball Lightning

“Sometimes you fly all the way only to discover it
would have been better to have fallen halfway.”
― Liu Cixin, Ball Lightning

“Sometimes what we find hardest to tolerate in others is our own reflection.”
― Liu Cixin, Ball Lightning

“Ball lightning had molded me into this form; from that night of terror in my youth, the shape of my psyche had been determined. I was destined to live my whole life with a terror no one else could feel.”
― Liu Cixin, Ball Lightning

“you’re at your most shallow and naïve when you believe that any one new-concept weapon will win the war.”
― Liu Cixin, Ball Lightning

“I’m just carrying out my pitiful little duty. Do you think I really care? I don’t. No physicist really cares about anything. Last century, when they turned over the formulas and techniques for atomic energy release to engineers and soldiers, then struck a pose of injured innocence at the price paid by Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Such hypocrites. They wanted to see the results, believe me. They wanted a demonstration of the power they had discovered. It was determined by their nature—by our natures. The only difference between them and me is that I’m not a hypocrite. I really want to see what will happen when those two strings of singularities get tangled together. Do I care about anything else? Hell no!”
― Liu Cixin, Ball Lightning

“autumn had come, the season of dying, of parting, and of writing poetry.”
― Liu Cixin, Ball Lightning

“They said I was irresponsible, grandstanding, and wrecking it for everyone. Naturally, they all see me as a weirdo. ‘Those whose courses are different cannot lay plans for one another.’* So I left.”
― Liu Cixin, Ball Lightning

“In Siberia, a one hundred percent guarantee isn’t necessarily a good thing. Sometimes you fly all the way only to discover it would have been better to have fallen halfway.”
― Liu Cixin, Ball Lightning

“I could bear a lifetime of exhausted fruitlessness; I could bear abandoning everything in my life, living out my days alone; I could even sacrifice my life if necessary; but I could not stand it if I never had another glimpse of it. My first encounter determined the path for my entire life, and I could not stand not seeing it again. Other people might not understand, but could a sailor stand never seeing the sea again? Or a mountaineer never seeing a snowcap? Or a pilot never seeing the sky?”
― Liu Cixin, Ball Lightning

“naturaleza, lo anómalo no es más que otra manifestación de lo normal.”
― Liu Cixin, La esfera luminosa

“pasando factura... Observando cómo Zhao se alejaba, me vinieron a la memoria aquellas palabras de Levalenkov: «A veces uno consigue volar hasta lo más alto solo para darse cuenta de que habría sido mejor precipitarse en el abismo a la mitad». Un profundo desasosiego por lo que pudiera pasarme en el futuro se apoderó”
― Liu Cixin, La esfera luminosa

“—En realidad, la belleza de un objeto puede ser completamente ajena a su función real. Por ejemplo, un sello: a ojos de un coleccionista filatélico su función práctica resulta irrelevante. —En”
― Liu Cixin, La esfera luminosa

“dejaría de ser hermosa. —¿Alguna vez te has parado a pensar por qué una cualidad tan macabra como la de poder quitar la vida puede llegar a inspirarnos belleza? —Es una cuestión muy profunda —respondí—.”
― Liu Cixin, La esfera luminosa

“It's hard to feel hate toward an unknowable mystery, regardless of how much disaster it may bring. At first I was only curious, but as I've learned more about it, that curiosity has transformed into total fascination. In my mind it became a doorway to another world, a world where I can see the wonders I have been dreaming about for so long.”
― Cixin Liu, Ball Lightning

“It's hard to feel hate toward an unknowable mystery, regardless of how much disaster it may bring. At first I was only curious, but as I've learned more about it, that curiosity has transformed into total fascination. In my mind it became a doorway to another world, a world where I can seethe wonders I have been dreaming about for so long.”
― Cixin Liu, Ball Lightning

“«La clave para llevar una vida maravillosa está en sentir fascinación por”
― Liu Cixin, La esfera luminosa

“No physicist really cares about anything. Last century, when they turned over the formulas and techniques for atomic energy release to engineers and soldiers, then struck a pose of injured innocence at the price paid by Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Such hypocrites. They wanted to see the results, believe me. They wanted a demonstration of the power they had discovered. It was determined by their nature—by our natures.”
― Liu Cixin, Ball Lightning

“Society was plagued by stoicism in the face of the profound mysteries of the natural world: its existence was the bane of science. If science had less of that sort of person, who knows, maybe humanity would have reached Alpha Centauri by now!”
― Liu Cixin, Ball Lightning

“Soon the carriers were in front of them, partially obscured by the destroyers: three nuclear-powered floating cities, three death-bringing iron mountains whose outlines seemed beyond the work of human hands. For the troops on the fishing boats, this massive fleet was a surreal sight, as if they had suddenly landed on a strange planet whose surface was covered in enormous iron castles.”
― Liu Cixin, Ball Lightning

“The three super-tornadoes were separated by less than their diameter, not even a thousand meters. Together they formed a nearly eight-kilometer-wide, slowly approaching earth-to-sky fence of death.”
― Liu Cixin, Ball Lightning

“All the people who have been killed by ball lightning exist in a quantum state. Strictly speaking, they haven’t really died. They’re like Schrödinger’s cat, and exist indeterminately in two states, living and dead.” Ding Yi stood up and walked to the window and looked out at the deep night. “To them, to be or not to be is indeed a question.”
― Liu Cixin, Ball Lightning

“Deep in my consciousness was a dark and shadowy place that I had striven to forget, and had nearly succeeded—a place I did not now dare to touch.”
― Liu Cixin, Ball Lightning

“Life is insignificant?” “From a physics perspective, the form of matter movement known as life has no more meaning than any other movement of matter. You can’t find any new physical laws in life, so from my standpoint, the death of a person and the melting of an ice cube are essentially the same thing. Dr. Chen, you tend to overthink things. You should learn to look at life from the perspective of the ultimate law of the universe. You’ll feel much better if you do.”
― Liu Cixin, Ball Lightning

“That’s what scientific research is. Every step you’ve taken, no matter how absurd, is a necessary one.”
― Liu Cixin, Ball Lightning

“It was like having a corpse buried deep in your backyard: though you think you’re free of it, you always know it’s there, and, more importantly, you always know that you know. Later you learn that to be truly free of it, you have to dig it up out of your backyard, carry it to some faraway place, and burn it, but you don’t have the mental energy to do that. The deeper it’s buried, the harder it is for you to dig up, since you can’t dare to imagine what it may have become while underground.…”
― Liu Cixin, Ball Lightning