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If you don’t know who Douglas Adams is you will probably not appreciate the following quotes by him. But if you do know him and love his ‘Hitchhikers to the Galaxy’ books and other writings, I think you will enjoy them…

• A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
• Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
• For a moment, nothing happened.Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.
• He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.
• He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher… or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
• Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
• I don’t believe it. Prove it to me and I still won’t believe it.
• I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
• I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.
• I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be.
• I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?
• I’m spending a year dead for tax reasons.
• If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.
• If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give ‘em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.
• In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
• Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
• It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
• It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry ‘I could have thought of that’ is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.
• It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it… anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
• Life is wasted on the living.
• Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.
• The difficulty with this conversation is that it’s very different from most of the ones I’ve had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.
• The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
• The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.
• The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.
• The mere thought hadn’t even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing my mind.
• There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
• This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
• Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
• Time is bunk.
• To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.
• We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem.
• You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

When I ran into this video of an interview of Billy Graham by Woody Allen I thought that this can be very interesting - and that turned out to be the case indeed.

From the introduction:

Woody Allen: “I don’t agree with him on a great many subjects. There are a few that we do agree on. But he is certainly the best in the world in what he does - Mr. Billy Graham!”

Billy Graham: “It’s very nice to be with you Woody, and I’d like to say that there is some things that I don’t agree with you on.”

Woody Allen: “The question is which one of us will be converted…”

But see for yourself…

and the second part…

I really liked Woody Allen’s little stab: “If you could have faith in me…”

or the little exchange…

Billy Graham: “O no, God is perfect!”

Woody Allen: “You know when I look in the mirror in the morning, it’s hard for me to believe that.”

Many years ago I watched a performance by David Copperfield on TV. We were sitting together in amazement watching Mr. Copperfield fly. It was a show he performed in Las Vegas in which he freely flew over the cuckoo’s nest - no wait - across the stage.

It was really impossible to fathom how he could do what he did with all the accepted laws of physics in full force. You could imagine strings - but then again - he flew through loops. There was just no way how all this could be possible - but still, we saw it with our own eyes. OK, not quite, there was a camera, lots of technology and a TV screen between us, but this was a life performance from a stage in Vegas and we all discounted the possibility that video tech was used to fool us.

I finally decided that the only possibility was that he was simply able to fly - and why not?

Should I be able to manage that feat now, I could imagine that I would create curiosity in form of a magic show to make some serious money (David Copperfield certainly did, and even managed the magic trick of convincing Claudia Schiffer to marry him.) Curiosity is, after all, the biggest magnet of attention, so if he would have gone around and demonstrated to everybody without a doubt that he could fly, he would have ended up in some government labs and he would have never been able to offer his island for rent for a mere 32,000 dollars a day. So, leaving it open to doubt that he could indeed fly was definitely a smart move.

But I am digressing a bit, I actually wanted to look at the possibility that something that’s not possible, IS possible - like flying! Douglas Adams gives us a simple recipe on how to learn. He teaches us that you just have to throw yourself to the ground - - and miss!

Sounds silly, but I actually believe, it’s true - honestly!

I remembered all this today when I watched another great magician who had demonstrated his abilities on the TED conference in 2004 - Keith Barry. He sampled some amazing tricks that probably keeps lots of people awake trying to figure out how he did it within the framework of accepted physics.

For me again the question was why accept the restriction of accepted physics? There are many things normal to us today that certainly appears to be magic to a person traveling on a time machine from 1500 AD. I am sure that physical laws have changed since then to allow for 400 ton chunks of metal hanging in the air for example. The first who bent and maybe broke the laws a little did it in a crude way, but they opened the floodgates for the changes.

Just take a look at what he amazes us with and tell me that this is NOT real magic…