Photo: National Geographic

Ball Lightning

News about natural disasters has been flooding in since the beginning of the summer (or much earlier). I have just seen some pictures of a wildfire in Russian, which ravaged the landscape before anyone could possibly react.

I suddenly recalled a natural phenomenon that I learnt from my Russian colleague: ball lightning. We were talking about weathers in the countries which we had visited. Her preference to minus 30 degree Celsius in Siberia than 30 degree Celsius in Japan was quite unbelievable to me. She then went on talking about a natural phenomenon, ball lightning, that is exclusively Russian. The cause and the formation of a ball lightning remain enigmatic to most scientists even today. It looks like a fire ball, basically. Its appearance, itinerary and explosion are never predictable, but dire consequences can easily be imagined. She once witnessed a ball lightning flashing into and exploding in a chimney, and the iron chimney immediately melted into a small solid chunk.

I then remembered a film that I saw with my brother about 10 to 12 years ago, Burnt by the Sun, a Russian film. Throughout the film there is a mysterious fire ball floating around in the air; no explanation is provided and no function is specifically depicted. I remember my brother simply ignored my attempt at understanding the fire ball from a psychoanalytical viewpoint. We were fairly puzzled, or perhaps just me.

When I brought up this experience, the colleague confirmed my speculation: the fire ball in the film is a ball lightning. She then suggested that the unpredictability of the ball's presence and its trajectory seems to serve as a metaphor for the surveillance of the Soviet Union under Stalin's dictatorship. No one knows what is going to happen, and everyone is watched closely.

It really made my day to have a long-term mystery solved. I can't wait to go back to the film to see how this new piece of information would shape a new understanding of the story for me.