The Science of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy – Michael Hanlon
The Science of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is divided into themed chapters, each dealing with an issue raised in Douglas Adams’ original “trilogy in five parts”. The Vogons trigger a discussion on the current search for extraterrestrial intelligence and why we haven’t seen any yet, Deep Thought prompts an explanation of artificial intelligence and chess-playing computers (if this interests you see the Plus articles Games people play and Practice makes perfect), and the Babel Fish introduces the problems encountered with computer translation software and the possibility of a universal language.
A mention of the Restaurant at the End of the Universe and the Big Bang Burger Bar leads into a review of modern cosmology and the fate of the Earth. Here Hanlon explains how the mathematical theories needed to explain the Universe have become steadily more impenetrable: the Newtonian description can be understood at A-level, but modern superstring theories involving M-branes and Calabi-Yau manifolds are utterly incomprehensible to all but a tiny group of mathematicians.
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