ATLANTA — Area man Don Thompson found himself utterly lost and nodding like a bobblehead at a cocktail party in Midtown. Four drinks in, the intellectual in him decided to enter a circle of his white-collar peers, who were animatedly discussing quantum entanglement, bitcoin, and other stuff he has no fucking clue about.
“I overheard them talking about the Chinese scientists who teleported a photon out of the atmosphere,” Thompson said. “I thought it sounded like a pretty cool topic — certainly better than hearing about hedge funds and stocks — but then they started talking about quantum entanglement. Blew my mind, honestly, but I think I played it off pretty well, though.”
“Don clearly had no idea what we were talking about. He couldn’t grasp the paradoxical nature of two particles holding complementary yet opposite values, how they could communicate with each other despite having no clear way of doing so, or how something can be neither individual or an inseparable whole,” said Jonathan Higgs. “It got worse once we started joking about quantum locality being equivalent to entanglement. He actually took it seriously. Poor guy.”
Thompson considered attempting to steer the conversation towards teleportation as he had seen it in sci-fi movies, bringing it back to his realm of comprehension. However, he was relieved at first when the conversation naturally digressed.
But then, somehow the group got onto discussing the crypto-currency and digital payment system bitcoin — another topic that left Thompson staring intently like a prairie dog searching for a clue.
Once again, the area man found himself right on the periphery of comprehension. He was just smart enough to glean the significance of bitcoin and blockchain, without the attention span to properly connect its details.
“I don’t have to be the smartest guy in the room. In fact, I never am,” said Thompson, “but as an old philosopher once said, ‘I know that I know nothing.’”
