story - The Q M Experiment

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Today I ran a creative writing workshop, where I set three exercises for the attendees. The first was to break the golden rule that writers should always write about what we know, by writing about something we know nothing about but make it look as if we were experts on the subject. A few writers looked a little baffled by the idea at first but once we got going it worked very well. Subjects picked by the authors themselves included Belly dancing and Australian Rules Football. I settled for astonishing the World with my (absolute absence of) knowledge of quantum mechanics. Here is the story I created. The Q M Experiment Yes, I can see we’re trapped, but don’t start blaming me. It’s just a coincidence that in no way disproves or discredits my theory that 14 people really can fit in an elevator designed to only carry six people at once. By putting the heaviest people on the shoulders of the smaller lighter ones we make the elevator think there are fewer of us on board. It creates a quantum redistribution shift of the weight, hiding the truth from the laws of physics. Please stop moaning that I’m too heavy to stand on your shoulders. I told you that if you breath out as I breath in I’ll seem much lighter. Plus, I am pressing my hands against the elevator ceiling which again helps put our weight above us taking weight way from our feet. Yes, I know the floor of the lift is starting to splinter. I can see it from here. It’s obviously a defect in the cheap design of the elevator-box itself and nothing to do with us cramming ourselves in here. Oh dear, the eggs we were all pressing between our knees have all broken in their carrier bags now. It must be a bad batch of bags or unusually sharp edged eggs. My hypothetical theory that if you exceed weights enough you make containers lose count of their full contents still goes un-disproven. It’s all about absurdification of quantities. Similarly, if we can all shuffle round enough, we can deceive the lift floor into thinking most us are not really here. In fact, if the hole in the floor expands much more we won’t be here, we’ll be down the shaft, and when our souls vacate our bodies we really will be a lot lighter. Hey, which one of you just pressed the emergency alarm button? You’ve ruined my experiments again. Arthur Chappell