Thursday, November 17, 2011

When jokes go beyond a laugh

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.