Saturday 15 June 2013

The Unlikely Story


One day during morning break a boy was seen wandering aimlessly in the undergrowth on the wrong side of the school fence. 

The fence was too high for him to have climbed over and the gate was securely locked. The RE teacher, who was on playground duty at the time, asked the boy how it was he had got there.  The boy said that he had absolutely no idea. One moment he was leaning against the fence in the playground with his friends and the next he was on the other side. The RE teacher examined the fence but found nothing untoward.

So the RE teacher, being a trusting soul, took the boy to see the Physics teacher and had him repeat his unlikely story.

'It sounds,' the Physics teacher said after a little thought, 'rather like quantum tunnelling, when a particle tunnels through a barrier that it classically couldn't surmount thanks to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and probability density. Normally of course that sort of thing would only happen to subatomic particles.'
'Well he is quite short' pointed out the English teacher who was passing by and who, like most English teachers, knew very little about science.   
'Anyway,' went on the Physics teacher, 'the chances of such an event occurring must be, well, at least 200 million billion to one.'

The RE teacher (whose mind contained a host of equally implausible explanations) decided to make nothing of it and the boy, who had simply arrived late to school and had made up the whole story in an attempt to avoid a detention, was free to go.


1 comment:

  1. I would say the kid was smarter than both well-educated adults.

    Cool story, Bo (^;

    ReplyDelete

Blog Archive

Followers