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Or consider this, told to a condemned man: Speak! If you lie, you will be hanged. If you tell the truth, you will be put to the sword. So the prisoner says: I will be hanged! After much tortured discussion, the jailors decide they have no choice but to release him. Language is rife with a myriad of contradictions that we merely ignore. Ask someone what he or she thinks happens after death, and one common reply is, “I think there will just be nothing.” Now, that seems to be a valid statement, but as we saw in a previous chapter, the verb to be contradicts nothingness. One can’t be nothing. Our frequent encounters with the term be nothing or is nothing have numbed us into imagining that it expresses something valid and logical, when in fact it says nothing comprehensible. The point to all this is to instill a proper wariness for language and logic. Those are tools used for specific purposes, and work well for what they are intended to do, such as simple communications like please pass the salt. But every tool has uses and also limitations. We discover this when we find a nail sticking out of a doorjamb and want to punch it back in, but a quick search of the cabinet uncovers only a pair of pliers. We really want and need a hammer but are too lazy to spend more time looking for it, so we start hammering away using the edge of the pliers. This doesn’t work well, and soon we have bent the nail instead of driving it in. We have used the wrong tool for the job. Logic and verbal language are the wrong tools for the job of understanding quantum theory. Math works much better (but even then merely shows us how it operates, but not why it is as it is). Logic also fails when discussing things that have no comparatives. We tell a friend how wonderfully deep blue the sky looks on this crisp autumn day, but this would of course be meaningless to a person born blind. One needs experience or comparisons with the known for language and thinking to be productive. One of the authors saw a T-shirt imprinted with a standard Ishihara test for color blindness, consisting of lots of little pastel-colored dots. My colorblind friend saw it only as a random, meaningless pattern, but to everyone else, the shirt said, “Fuck the colorblind.”