From the "My Wife Would Never Make This Mistake" Department:
Out last weekend with friends at a bar in Philadelphia — a bachelor party in fact, God bless the groom — and a woman struck up conversation with several of us at the end of a narrow corridor crowded with people. "I wish I were Wonder Woman," she announced. "That way I could just fly my invisible plane to the other side of the room."
I hear this sort of statement all the time, and it's time I dealt with it, because it reflects a fundamental conceptual misunderstanding of invisibility. An airplane that is invisible still takes up space. That is, its invisibility does not make it easier to get through or around a crowd. You might be able to go
over that same crowd, but in a room with ten-foot ceilings, that's not really a consideration. This woman was clearly confusing
invisibility with
intangibility (definitions provided). Wonder Woman's airplane was invisible — you could not see it, but other than that it had all the characteristics common to airplanes, such that if you tried to maneuver it around inside a populated room, you would invariably thud some heads, spill some drinks, and rouse the tough guys by the bar into "You got a problem?" postures.
Not to mention that, as I pointed out to this woman before she walked briskly away,
"You'd still have to have at least an airstrip or something cleared for you to land that thing." Friends of mine nodded their heads in agreement.
Now that I think about it, there was probably a reason why she wanted to be on the other side of the room.
