Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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.

Phantom of the Opera

Are any readers of this blog familiar with the story of The Phantom of the Opera? I recently listened to an audio version of the original novel (1911), and that prompted me to also watch the movie (2004) and listen to the soundtrack of the musical (1986). Brian and I saw the musical in Milwaukee in 2000.

I guess it is a story that grows on you. And I'm not the only one. According to Wikipedia, the musical alone "is the highest-grossing entertainment event of all time."

For all of that, I liked the novel best. The movie is based on the musical, so they are similar to each other. The novel is much more complex than either. The character of the Phantom, for example, is much more complex and interesting in the novel. And there are several characters in the novel that are completely missing from the musical and the movie, such as Raoul's older brother and the Persian.

Two more comments for this post.

First, the line "keep your hand at the level of your eyes" is used several times in all three works, but it's not clear in the movie, for example, what it means. The novel clearly explains that it is to defend against the Phantom's weapon, the Punjab lasso. The instruction is to keep your arm in front of you, bent at the elbow with the hand up and at the level of your eyes. It is as if you were holding a handgun pointed vertically, ready to bring it down and fire when a target appears. (In the novel, Raoul initially holds a gun in this manner, until his arm tires of holding the unnecessary weight of the gun.) If the lasso is thrown, it will go around both your neck and your arm, allowing you to free yourself instead of being strangled.

Second, the opera building itself is more imposing and interesting in the novel. It is described as 17 stories above ground and 5 stories below ground. To house all of the workers described in the novel, including a stable of horses, it must have been as large as a city block. The opera building in the movie does not seem this grand.

The novel is based on this actual building. Marion, have you visited this building? Is it grand? Is that part of Paris really over an underground lake? Laura, when you visit Paris next summer, perhaps you will be able to see the Paris Opera. If you include that in your itinerary, I recommend that you read the novel first. And then read about the author, Gaston Leroux. Some of the things he did in his lifetime help explain features of the building he describes in the novel (e.g., the prison previously used by the Paris Commune).

Does anyone else have a favorite aspect of this story?

UPDATE: I have been referring to the original novel as being published in 1911, but that was when it was translated into English. It was published in French in serial form in 1909-1910. Click here for a free online English translation of the original novel.

Vermont Economic Conference

I attended the annual Vermont Economic Outlook Conference in Burlington on Friday. Brian and Emily--I thought you would be interested to know that one of the speakers was a Colby grad and one of the speakers was a Middlebury grad. The Middlebury grad was Governor Jim Douglas. The Colby grad was Eric Rosengren, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Snowshoeing 1/5

Nancy and I went snowshoeing yesterday with the Duchaceks, up behind their house. Couldn't persuade Allie and Laura to go.

The temperature was just below freezing, quite pleasant. Here is an interesting "snow rope" we saw:

We saw some "rubbings" where deer had rubbed their antlers against the trees to scrape off the velvet. (Click to enlarge picture.) There was about 2 feet of snow in the woods.

New Years 2008

What is a Yankee? (Besides a baseball player or an ag banker?) Click here for one answer. I remember reading this definition in the Burlington Free Press when I was a kid.

This is what was left of Elaine's apple/cranberry pie after breakfast on this New Years Day:

It was delicious!

(The title of the post that I linked to above -- It's Yankees All The Way Down -- is a play on words from a story told by Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time.)

Happy New Years, everyone!

Holiday Fun

What are people in our household doing for fun this holiday season? Well, since you asked...

Christmas Eve found a crew of elves making gingerbread houses and gingerbread men. Starting at 7 o'clock and moving clockwise: Allison Duchacek, Emily*, Margaret Lund, Camila Sanchez, Jessica Savage, Laura, Congcong Li. (*Can't see Emily, but can see her gingerbread house.)

Thursday the 27th found more elves working on a yellow ducky in our front yard. Left to right: Tiffany Cochran, Regan Duffy, Brian. Laura also helped (she's not in the picture because she took it). The yellow coloring is from food coloring. The black eyes are two pieces from a Go game that Brian got for Christmas (from Silk Street in Beijing).

Note the new color of the house next door. Our long-time neighbor, Shirley Winslow, died last February. Her granddaughter Priscilla Winslow and husband Phillip bought the house. They painted it just before Halloween.

Christmas 2007

Marion, we have a white Christmas this year!

Here's our back yard at about 8:05 AM this morning:

About 12" (30 cm) of snow on the ground, overcast, 33F (0C).

We had more snow earlier in the season. After the second big storm on Dec. 16, we had 20" (50 cm) on the ground, but it rained on Dec. 23 and we lost some snow.

Merry Christmas to everyone!

The Lie Group E8

Advances in mathematics sometimes lead to advances in science and technology. (Because significant parts of our world can be described mathematically--see previous post "What is reality?")

There was an interesting advance in mathematics in 2007. I admit that I don't understand the math here. It's way over my head. I understand just enough to see that this might be significant.

There is a branch of mathematics called Lie Groups which deals with symmetry. Symmetry is an important concept in physics. "It is only slightly overstating the case to say that physics is the study of symmetry." (source)

One of the most complex Lie Groups is called E8. In 2007 a team of mathematicians succeeded in mapping E8. See this web site, which provides a good explanation of the achievement. (Brian, note that this project was at the cutting edge of both mathematics and computer science.)

It did not take long before a physicist connected the mapping of E8 to basic theories of the universe. See this interesting article. (Paper here.)

UPDATE 12/05/09: The physicist mentioned in the previous paragraph is Garrett Lisi. To see Garrett Lisi talk about his "exceptionally simple theory of everything" based on E8, see his talk on TED. Highly recommended.

What is reality?

I am intrigued by the question: What is reality? This is an old question, of course, going back at least to the Allegory of the Cave in Plato's Republic.

One interesting aspect of this question is that while reality is not created by humans, much of reality can be accurately described by mathematics—which is created by humans. An example is quantum mechanics, without which we wouldn't have such things as blogs (because we wouldn't have computers or fiber optic communications lines or much else of modern technology).

There isn't any a priori reason to expect mathematics to describe any portion of reality. And yet it does. It is a beautiful and wonderful feature of our world. Einstein said: "Equations are more important to me [than politics], because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity."

There are some who take this idea further, and postulate that our entire world is a computer simulation. Click here for links to one recent discussion of this idea. Jaron Lanier comments here.

Whenever I think about reality, I remember a science fiction book, now out of print, that I read as a teenager: Simulacron-3, by Daniel Galouye. This book was published in 1964, before the age of digital computers, and so the computers in this book are analog instead of digital, but the concept is the same.

If part or all of reality is mathematical or computational, does that take the fun out of it? Does it make our world deterministic and predictable? Not at all! Only in recent decades have we begun to understand this. The mathematics of nonlinear dynamical systems, popularly called chaos theory, shows that unpredictable random behavior can result from extremely simple mathematical systems. An excellent book on this topic is "Chaos," by James Gleick.

This post provides a brief introduction and some background. In the next post, I will comment on something new that recently caught my eye.

Elf Yourself

What are kids doing at college these days??!

Brian
Emily

Maybe the more significant question is what is their mother doing at home these days?!! (I submit this as evidence in support of my comment to the previous post.)

NUMB3RS

I could not sleep last night and so I uncharacteristically turned on the TV. I found myself watching an episode of NUMB3RS.

Much to my surprise, there were numerous references to Richard Feynman. One of the suspects had been a student of Feynman's. There was discussion of whether Feynman would or would not have agreed with certain philosophical positions. Mysterious references to "RF59" were explained at the end of the show as shorthand for a famous paper that Feynman wrote in 1959.

So, has Hollywood developed an appreciation of Richard Feynman? Not likely. Although I had never watched NUMB3RS before, I had read about it on the Wolfram Blog. The four employees of Wolfram Research who provide the math consulting for NUMB3RS are undoubtedly familiar with Richard Feynman, especially since their boss, Stephen Wolfram, was a student of Feynman's.

This post on the Wolfram Blog provides more background about the math consulting that Wolfram Research provides for NUMB3RS. It is a fascinating read, and contains several links to even more interesting information.

You can read "RF59" here. It was actually a lecture that Feynman gave at a meeting of the American Physical Society at Caltech. The subject of "RF59" is miniaturization, down to the level of direct manipulation of individual atoms. We now call this field nanotechnology, and Feynman is considered by some to be the father of nanotechnology.

Feynman subsequently gave his "RF59" talk to other audiences, including high school physics students. It is entirely readable by general audiences. I have just now reread it and it is still fresh and interesting, even though it is almost 50 years old. Brian, you will of course not be surprised that Feynman discusses computer technology in this talk. But Emily, you may be surprised at what Feynman has to say about biology in "RF59."

UPDATE: I referenced "RF59" in this post on my work blog.

Camila has moved to the Lunds

Camila moved to her next host family, the Lunds in Waterville, on Nov. 25.

Camila, we greatly enjoyed having you stay with us! We hope we will continue to see you often during the rest of your year in Vermont, and we look forward to meeting your family when they visit.