So, what you are saying is basically that if you want to win over the hearts and minds of others, you need to introduce controversial topics one at a time? I totally agree. However, what do you do when you only have about 24 hours left to tell your story… because, it just so happens that you are one of the band members on the deck of the Titanic and the captain has just asked you to strike up the music?
Well, there is another approach, tell them everything…
Quote: “fact is stranger than fiction.”
Here are some true stories for your amusement.
DOING ROUNDS
When I was in medical school we rotated once onto a psychiatric ward to study clinical psychiatry. There was a group of us (students) and an attending clinical professor. We were introduced to a patient one day that suffered from a type of clinical psychosis. The patient said that he wasn’t feeling very good that day. The professor asked the patient, what it was that was bothering him. The patient replied, “My penis is turning into a button.” We all looked at one another, as one does, when confronted with something that seems crazy. The professor then asked the patient to show us what he meant, and to pull down his pants. So, the patient, while lying in a hospital bed, undid his trousers and pulled them (and underwear) down. We all looked in amazement. No word of a lie, but his penis looked just like a button. An inch or so wide, and only about 3-4 millimetres high. The patient wasn’t crazy after all.
2) AN ARGUMENT WITH MY GIRLFRIEND
I arrived early one day at my girlfriend’s apartment. She wasn’t there because she hadn’t gotten home from work just yet. While I waited she called me on my cell phone and said that she was walking home, and wondered if I would like to walk towards her to meet her halfway, maybe to go out to dinner or drinks, or something. I said yes, and started to walk in her direction. As I walked, I kind of went into a daydream. I started counting the cracks in pavement with each stride. Within the interval of two or three paces, I imagined that I had walked past her and had missing her, and that we walked past one another. I then imagined an argument that ensued that seemed to last about 40 minutes where she became angry at me for not seeing her. In that argument there were many points and counter-points being made by each of us, and I had managed to say all the right things to calm her down and to salvage the evening… so that we could have fun and not argue anymore. And then do you know what happened? We did walk past one another. She went into a rage. And, we had the same argument that I had just previously imagined, and it dragged on for about 40 minutes. I remembered and repeated all those things I had previously said to her in that daydream, and that eventually calmed her down. In other words, I experienced an episode of 40 minutes compressed into one or two seconds, which also predicted the future.
3) DELAYED CHOICE DOUBLE SLIT EXPERIMENT
When you shine light, as a wave front, onto a barrier with two closely approximated slits, the light projected through those slits will hit the back wall (behind those slits) to create a pattern that is striped. The striped pattern is called an interference pattern because it has several stripes (more than two) of alternating light and dark bands that coincide with the wave nature of the light, causing constructive versus destructive interference. This can be illustrated and explained on a piece of paper using simple geometry. Easy peazy.
When you send a single photon, not a wave front, through those slits one at a time (let’s say one every second) and you do this for a long time… and record the light hitting the back wall… you will still get the same interference pattern. So, at this point, you will agree that the interference pattern has nothing to do with the wave front geometry that initially explained the pattern. Somehow the photons are interfering with themselves one at a time. At this point you should start thinking that something isn’t quite right, the way Neo might.
When you send a single photon, again not a wave front, through those slits one at a time, but now decide to place a sensor to detect which of the slits the photon has passed through… you no longer get an interference pattern. Instead, you get two stripes. One stripe for the left slit, and one stripe for the right strip. So, observation or measurement, has unexpectedly changed the result.
Background info: when you take a photon and split it in half, such that there are two new photons, those two photons will be entangled. Entangled particles exhibit the behaviour that if you measure one of the particle’s properties, its entangled partner will have the opposite quality. For instance, if you measure one photon and determine that it has vertical polarization, then its partner will have a horizontal polarization.
Now, when you take a photon and split it in half and allow one of the halves to go through a double slit at a close distance, and allow its partner to go through a double slit at a much longer distance away, something very strange happens. When you place a sensor at the very long distance double slit to detect which slit the photon went through, it will show you the expected absence of interference pattern… with only two stripes of light… one left and one right. When you don’t do measurements with the slit sensor the pattern goes back to the expected interference pattern… with many bands of light. Good so far? The photon that travels to the short distance double slit will have already collided with the wall, before its twin reaches the long distance double slit. So, if you measure the long distance photon, by slit detector, even though the event for the short distance photon is already over… the short distance photon will behave according to the decision made to observe-or-not-observe made in its future. Furthermore, if you create a random decision maker to observe-or-not-observe after the short photon’s event is over but before the long photon’s event, you will still get the same result. In other words, a decision made in the future alters the past. Well at least this is how it appears.
The other quality about entanglement is that it is instantaneous, as if there was no intervening space between entangled particles.
Conclusion: time and space are not what they appear to be.
4) OUR WORLD IS MADE UP OUT OF MANY LAYERS OF RULE BASED ABSTRACTION
True reality is pure imagination and thought, and the essence of what is called everything. Life is the only thing that exists.
5) COFFEE BREAK AT WORK
I was working once for a cabinet making company and I was standing chatting with my coworkers during a coffee break. I had just completed a cabinet for a customer’s order and it was sitting on a bench at a distance from where we were standing. As we chatted, in a kind of overlapped memory, I watched one of my coworkers walk over to the cabinet slowly. He picked up a long stick of wood, an off-cut, and began striking the cabinet with it. He walked over back to us casually and continued chatting, and then all of a sudden everyone noticed the damage to the cabinet including the guy I witnessed hitting it. Nobody else witnessed what I saw, and I said nothing.
6) THE FUTURE OCCURRED A LONG TIME AGO
In the future, they will be able to stream thoughts, like television signals, that mimic physical reality. Have you ever experienced a memory of a memory? In the future, they will be able to stream that too. It will become virtually indistinguishable from real life, and for those unaware of it it will become their new reality.
7) ALIENS AND UFO’s ARE THE LEAST OF OUR PROBLEMS
Where are all the aliens you ask? Where aren’t they.