Sometimes they become science fiction. It’s amazing the way the
human mind generates ideas when it’s just relaxed or having fun. The theme of
my professors’ jokes is to make fun of slower students who don’t get things
fast enough, in a friendly way. Today we were studying Digital Logic Decoders
and I think their typical rectangular shape invoked the thought of a fridge in
his mind and so he said, this isn’t a fridge although it could be if you can
put a bottle of something in it and it gives it back to you as a bottle of
something else.
It was funny. But my laugh went beyond the joke. I got high
on the idea that this could one day be possible. If I want to hide some
material, let’s say for example, gold, I would put it in that fridge that would
encrypt that gold piece and make it look like it’s a lump of coal. (I remember hearing
that there is indeed a way to convert coal to gold, but I’m not really a
chemist and that’s not the topic). This kind of fridge (or reality
steganography device) could be a great tool that could change how things are
kept safe and if physicists get something like this, the scientific concepts
could change how we manufacture things and view resources.
That was a serious joke. It could inspire someone to write a
science-fiction novel. That is the kind of jokes I like, I hope all my friends
would start joking in this thoughtful way. It made me think. Science and its fiction, is amazing.
