And Another Thing...

by Eoin Colfer

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  THE END IS NIGH.

  But nevermind. You can find out more about life, the universe and everything, including:

  • The story behind the least expected comeback of all space and time

  • The song inspired by the book, ‘And Another Thing’ by The Blizzards, taken from their debut album ‘Domino Effect’

  • The greatest Hitchhiker fans this side of the galaxy

  • Improbable events, ridiculous games and unexpected competitions to celebrate 30 years of a wholly remarkable book

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  A Rough Guide to The Science of Hitchhiker’s

  The few scientists who appear in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are not spared the mockery dished out to practitioners of most other professions. One particular group, for instance, dedicate their time to thoroughly pointless experiments involving a robot and a herring sandwich. Yet Adams was, of course, very far from being sceptical of scientific endeavour as a whole.

  Science fiction and science fact have long enjoyed a symbiotic relationship, and several concepts in Hitchhiker’s are at least half-rooted in real-life discourse. Unfortunately, many involve quantum theory, in which physics steers dangerously close to metaphysics, in the process mangling the lay reader’s brain as surely as a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. Here, then, is an attempt to explain some of the thinking behind concepts such as time travel and parallel universes, without once mentioning Schrödinger’s cat. (If you haven’t yet become acquainted with that hypothetical feline, simultaneously dead and alive inside a sealed box, you’d be well advised to keep it that way.) The following pages also document how some of Adams’s more inspired creations – the “Dish of the Day”, sub-etha networks and the like – have proved impressively prescient of later developments in the realms of science and technology.

  The birth of the Universe

  The best explanation of the Universe’s origins in the Hitchhiker’s saga comes from an inebriated Ford Prefect – although he promptly ruins everything by announcing that he was not detailing the Universe’s origins at all, but simply describing a good way to relax. Still, Ford constructs a decent, if rather basic, descriptive model: simply fill a bath with fine sand, film it all trickling down the plughole, and then reverse the film. That, he says, is the birth of the Universe.

  Ford is essentially describing the Big Bang theory, the idea that the Universe exploded from an infinitely dense singularity approximately 15 billion years ago. In Hitchhiker’s, the theory is referred to indirectly via the “Big Bang Burger Bar”, and in Eccentrica Gallumbits’ description of Zaphod as “the Best Bang since the Big One”.

  Most scientists seem to regard the Big Bang as the best explanation we’ve got for the birth of our Universe. The tricky question, and not just in terms of a measurement of Zaphod’s sexual potency, is: what was there before the Big Bang? One theory states that the Big Bang wasn’t the beginning of everything at all, merely the beginning of our Universe. Another, supported by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, says that the Big Bang could have been preceded by an unstable, ten-dimensional universe; the Big Bang represented that universe splitting into the four dimensions of our current existence. Still others say that we can’t hope to answer pesky questions like this until we have developed a Theory of Everything – see the Ultimate Answer.

  Computers

  The computer population of Hitchhiker’s ranges from the irritating (Eddie) to the downright malevolent (Hactar). Its most prominent figures, however, are Deep Thought and its successor Earth – both, incidentally, portrayed in a rather more positive light.

  As with many aspects of Hitchhiker’s, Adams’s most fantastical, far-fetched predictions have been achieved, even surpassed by the staggering speed of technological progress. It now seems ludicrous to contemplate a computer that is, like Deep Thought, as big as a small city. And the power of computers has increased beyond all recognition. We are not told the speed at which Deep Thought processes data, but it’s debatable whether it could compete with IBM’s Roadrunner computer, which made computing history in 2008 when it achieved a processing speed of more than a thousand trillion operations a second.

  Even if Deep Thought were able to triumph over Roadrunner in a game of cyber Top Trumps, its period of triumph would be limited due to Moore’s Law, which effectively states that computer processing speed doubles every two years, thus increasing exponentially. Adams even refers indirectly to computer obsolescence, in that Deep Thought can only calculate the Ultimate Answer; working out the Ultimate Question requires a more powerful successor.

  Incidentally, Deep Thought itself has become a reality in one very literal sense, in the form of a chess computer named in its honour. Though that computer lost to grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1989, Kasparov was subsequently defeated by its successor – not planet Earth, but another chess computer called Deep Blue. Ironically, the Earth too is in a sense fulfilling its function as a supercomputer, following the rise of the Internet (see sub-etha networks). Unlike the Earth designed by Deep Thought, however, our version seems to be largely dedicated to pornography.

  Dish of the Day

  One of the greatest bit-part characters in Hitchhiker’s is the Dish of the Day, a large dairy animal that actually wants to be eaten – so much so that it will recommend various parts of its anatomy to diners. Arthur is horrified by the concept, though Zaphod points out that eating an animal that wants to be eaten is surely better than eating one that doesn’t. The animal heartily agrees, disapproving of Arthur’s preference for a green salad; as it explains, it knows many vegetables that, by contrast, don’t want to be eaten at all.

  On one level, the Dish of the Day – and the morals of consuming said creature in relation to a green salad – is just a quick joke at the expense of the vegetarian lobby. As usual, however, there are serious issues alongside the humour, most notably in the parallels with genetically modified food. The Dish of the Day was created only through careful breeding – of the kind that has been going on for hundreds of years and has, for example, bred the mothering instinct out of chickens to increase their laying rate – but GM has vastly increased our ability to manipulate nature in such ways.

  As science-fiction author A.M. Dellamonica has pointed out, if Adams was alluding to GM food, he was predicting, rather than commenting on, a societal trend. The Flavr Savr tomato was not approved by the US Food and Drug Administration until 1994, a decade and a half after Adams created the Dish of the Day. But, yet again, Adams’s fiction was very close to the mark: Dellamonica notes that Arthur’s refusal to consume his Dish of the Day steak with the same gusto as Ford or Zaphod is very much echoed in twenty-first-century scepticism regarding transgenic food.

  Though talking cows are a way off, science writer Michael Hanlon has noted that the Dish of the Day throws up ethical dilemmas that are not so far removed from our own reality, particularly given NASA’s experiments with growing meat in a Petri dish. If, for instance, it became possible to breed animals that didn’t feel pain, would vegetarians feel comfortable eating them?

  The end of the Universe

  Though we never get to see the actual end of all Creation, Adams does offer some idea of what to expect via the extended sequence in Milliways, the “Restaurant at the End of the Universe”. Max Quordlepleen, the ultimate showbiz host, describes the last remaining red-hot suns being destroyed by photon storms, followed by an incredibly bright light before all of Infinity collapses into a void.

  This, essentially, is the reverse of the Big Bang theory (see the birth of the Universe), a point Zaphod makes explicit by describing the Milliways climax as “nothing but a gnab gib”. Known by scientists as the Big Crunch hypothesis, this is certainly accepted as one possible (although unlikely) way the Universe could end, perhaps in a few tens of bill
ions of years. The science basically says that the expansion of the Universe would slow down and eventually be stopped by the immense gravitational pull of all the matter and dark matter. Everything would then implode into the infinitely dense singularity in which it existed prior to the Big Bang.

  In Adams’s scenario, this moment is followed by a state of affairs “that wasn’t merely a vacuum, it was simply nothing”. But there are those who suspect that there may be a more cyclical process at work, just as the Time Turbines pull Milliways back into existence, ready for the lunch sitting. According to this view, the contraction of the Universe would be swiftly followed by another Big Bang, the whole Universe constantly yo-yoing between the Bang and the Crunch. Though no entirely respectable scientist has put it in quite these terms, it’s basically the existence of Agrajag blown up to cosmic scale.

  The Big Crunch, and the associated Big Bounce, is only one theory of the end of the Universe, however. Another possibility is the Big Freeze, whereby the Universe simply continues to expand ad infinitum. Stars burn out and the temperature of the Universe drops, leaving a cold, dark wasteland of dead stars that exists for all eternity. There is also a third theory, dubbed Steady State, that says the Universe will continue to expand but is nevertheless in a state of equilibrium, because new matter is being continuously created to populate the expanding Universe. In other words, no Big Freeze, no Big Crunch, and everyone lives happily ever after. Unfortunately for us, however, this last scenario is considered highly unlikely by the majority of scientists.

  The Guide

  Though its appearance has changed somewhat between different formats of the story, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy remains fundamentally an electronic guidebook with the words “Don’t Panic” printed on the front. Of course, what might have seemed futuristic in the late 1970s has now become ubiquitous, even old-fashioned. In 1984’s So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, Adams compares The Guide to a small laptop, but for a machine that is meant to represent cutting-edge technology, even that description seems outmoded in an age when even a mobile phone can take photos and send emails.

  To give him his due, however, Adams was well aware of subsequent technological developments, particularly those that enabled mobile Internet access. Though smartphones occurred too late for the novels or original radio scripts, he certainly realized their importance to his “Earth edition” of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, h2g2. Indeed, h2g2 Ltd actually launched a WAP version in 1999, with the aim of offering location-specific information on cinema or bus timetables.

  Though WAP may now be old news, The Guide is still reminiscent of several items that constitute everyday pocket or handbag content (most of them sadly beyond the reach of someone on a budget of just 30 Altairian dollars a day). Described in the first novel as looking like a large pocket calculator with a hundred or so tiny buttons, The Guide apparently appears to be something like a BlackBerry, except with a slightly larger screen. In terms of function, it combines elements of the iPhone – or iPod, in that it speaks its entries – with those of eBook readers such as the Sony Reader or Amazon’s Kindle. Indeed, Randall Munroe’s XKCD comic made explicit the link with the latter product, depicting the Kindle as simply The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with a fresh coat of paint.

  Infinite Improbability Drive

  It is thanks to the Infinite Improbability Drive that the Heart of Gold is the most powerful spaceship ever built. From transforming its occupants into woollen dolls to turning entire planets into banana fruitcake, it can undertake any conceivable action, however seemingly improbable. The only condition is that someone on board must know precisely how improbable that action is.

  Science writer Michael Hanlon has been impressed by Adams’s emphasis on the power of improbability, pointing out that highly unlikely things happen all the time without contradicting the laws of physics. Indeed our whole Universe may owe its existence to some highly unlikely quantum shenanigans. Hanlon also notes that probability is today being utilized perhaps more than ever before, be it in synthesizing new drugs or monitoring terrorist threat.

  From a scientific viewpoint, there are two key ideas involved in Adams’s description of the Infinite Improbability Drive: the Theory of Indeterminacy and the concept of Brownian Motion. Both are real enough. The former is a cornerstone of quantum physics, describing the incompleteness of the physical state. Brownian Motion, meanwhile, is a concept relating to the zigzag “random walk” of particles in a gas or liquid, in this case a cup of tea.

  The Drive performs many tasks, at one point turning a pair of incoming missiles into a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias. Its primary function, however, is as a method of crossing vast interstellar distances. This too is at least partly based on genuine scientific theory, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle stating that the more precisely we can measure the velocity of a subatomic particle, the less accurately we can know its position. If an electron doesn’t have a definite location but rather an infinite number of possible locations, then the Heart of Gold could – theoretically at least – pass through every place in existence before “collapsing the wave function” and deciding where to stop. It would thus achieve spontaneous space travel.

  Science hasn’t yet made this a reality but, then again, it’s not something one wants to rush. Adams himself makes this quite clear through the tale of the ominously monikered Starship Titanic, constructed so that any malfunction was infinitely improbable. Unfortunately, this represented a rather fundamental misunderstanding of probability: even an infinitely improbable event will happen some time, given a long enough window of opportunity, and may even happen right away if you’re extraordinarily unlucky. Twisting this logic for comic effect, Adams declares that the infinitely improbable is in fact “very likely to happen almost immediately”. As a result, his Starship Titanic suffers Total Existence Failure mere moments into its maiden voyage.

  Machines

  From robots – Marvin, of course, but also the Krikkiters and others – to talking doors and elevators, the Hitchhiker’s universe is one run by electronic machines (among them, of course, computers – see above). And again, in many ways, Adams’s vision has been borne out in practice, in-car satellite navigation systems being just one example, even sharing the anthropomorphic properties of Marvin or Eddie. Lifts don’t yet attempt to persuade their occupants into going down rather than up, but it’s surely not too far off.

  Digitization is clearly not without benefits. We are told, for instance, that The Ultra-Complete Maximegalon Dictionary requires a fleet of lorries for its transportation, and is therefore markedly less practical than the Hitchhiker’s Guide. And Adams himself was certainly no Luddite, his fascination with gadgets, particularly Apple Mac computers, suggesting that at least one part of him was thoroughly in favour of the digital revolution.

  At the same time, however, machines are portrayed with a certain ambivalence in Hitchhiker’s. Like the button on the Heart of Gold, the sole function of which seems to be the illumination of a panel reading “Please do not press this button again”, they can be ill-designed, frustrating and pointless. They can also be malevolent, as with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Mk 2, which threatened to spark a Terminator-style rise of the machines, although the story is not allowed to develop that far. Unlikely though it sounds, Arthur even becomes the dressing-gown-clad equivalent of John Connor, the Terminator franchise’s anti-machine warrior. His argument with a Nutri-Matic drink dispenser has unwittingly made him a hero on the planet of Brontitall, whose population have exiled their robots and built a statue of Arthur in tribute.

  Parallel universes

  Closely linked to infinite improbability, parallel universes – though strictly speaking, as The Guide explains, neither “parallel” nor “universes” – are a prominent theme in Hitchhiker’s. In the first novel, we encounter the idea of a replacement Earth. In So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, Arthur learns that the dolphins saved Earth from destruction by replacing it at the
last minute with a planet from another dimension. And in Mostly Harmless, we discover the planet of NowWhat, occupying exactly the same location as planet Earth but in a hellish parallel dimension; “right planet, wrong universe”, as Arthur gloomily puts it.

  Though parallel universes might feel like the stuff of science fiction, they’re actually regarded by many scientists as perfectly possible. One reason for this is simply that space is so enormous; the odds are that somewhere out there is a planet identical to ours (and, on it, someone very nearly identical to you). This is essentially the well-worn argument, alluded to when Arthur and Ford first encounter the Infinite Improbability Drive, that even a monkey could write Shakespeare, given a typewriter and sufficient time. Somewhere in the cosmos it’s probably already happened.

  There’s also a quantum interpretation for parallel universes that, like everything involving the dreaded Q word, is rather harder to get one’s head around. Simply, this states that whenever an event has multiple possible outcomes, all of these outcomes will occur: new universes are constantly being created. In Mostly Harmless, for instance, Tricia McMillan fails to leave the party with Zaphod, but another version of herself does leave the party and goes on to lead an entirely independent life gallivanting around the Galaxy. According to this view, the answer to the “grandfather paradox” – see time travel – is that in one universe you kill your grandfather, and in another you don’t.

  One other type of parallel existence in Hitchhiker’s is that experienced by Zaphod on Frogstar World B – not a real world at all, but rather a virtual reality: an electronically synthesized universe controlled from Zarniwoop’s briefcase. Like the characters in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Zaphod is unable to distinguish reality from the shadows – in this case, shadows of the digital variety, like the simulacra beloved of theorist Jean Baudrillard. Anyone who thinks this is merely the stuff of films such as The Truman Show or The Matrix has perhaps not encountered Second Life, a virtual world whose appeal is all too real.