In a comment on an earlier post, Emily says: "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy also mentions a theory about our reality being just a computer simulation."In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, it is known that the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is 42. Unfortunately no one knows what the Ultimate Question is. Earth was designed as a computer to find out what the Ultimate Question is. Alas, Earth is destroyed by the Vogons—to make way for an interstellar bypass—five minutes before the calculation is complete. And that's just the beginning of this rich, complicated story.
Another part of the story that involves interesting computations is the spaceship Heart of Gold, where the central computational area consists of an Italian restaurant. Calculations are done according to Bistromathics ("the most powerful computational force known to parascience") and the spaceship is powered by the Bistromathic Drive.
Brian and Emily, you are more familiar with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy than I am; do I have that about right?
There's more than one flavor to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy story. There's the radio version, the television version, the book version, the movie version and the computer game. And they are all slightly different! Kinda like the different versions of The Phantom of the Opera story, except that at least in that instance the different versions came from different people. In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, most of the various versions all came from the fertile mind of Douglas Adams. (Even the movie, which was released in 2005, after Adams died in 2001, was based on screenplay begun by Adams.)
The most widely known version of the story is the book version, which consists of a "trilogy" of five books:
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Life, the Universe and Everything
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Mostly Harmless
Plus there was another book, The Salmon of Doubt, published after Adams died, which may have been intended as the sixth book in the series.
CORRECTION: See the comments for a correction from Brian. I had my spaceships wrong.
UPDATE 10/06/10: I finally read The Salmon of Doubt. See this blog post.
2 comments:
You have it almost right, Dad, but you're confusing two different spaceships. The Heart of Gold is powered by an infinite improbability drive of the same name, that can cause anything to happen, so long as you can calculate exactly how improbable that thing is. There is another vehicle which comes along in the later books called the Starship Bistromath which, as you correctly stated, runs on bistromathics ("it is a well known fact that numbers inside an Italian bistro do not behave the same as numbers found anywhere else in the universe"). And, of course, the whole thing looks like a quaint Italian diner.
Ah, Krikkit. My bad. Thanks, Brian, for correcting me. Clearly I need to study more! Alas, I have little by way of resources at home to study. This book might make a good present for Christmas or birthday...
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