Douglas Adams wrote it... him and Towlie.

I believe Douglas Adams used to tell this story as something that actually happened to him.

His favourite part was that someone else out there had exactly the same story, but without the punchline of there being a second pack.

And Douglas Adams pointed out that our inability to create time travel is, in part, due to the tenses it would create.

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
-- Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy

Space; It seems to go on and on forever...but then you get to the end and a gorilla starts throwing barrels at you.
-- Fry, Futurama

Basically there's lots of space.

"The President is very much a figurehead - he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. "
-Douglas Adams, The HItchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I think there are aspects of this that fall into the realm of philosophy.

I personally don't think we can ever have "The Truth" in that ultimate sense. Pretend for a minute that the SUVAT equations (the equations of motion) are completely accurate. I can drop a ball from a certain height and you can time it and we'll find to some degree of accuracy that the equations were right.

The ball and the floor didn't need to calculate anything. Whilst me and you sit there with a stopwatch technical manual, assorted tape measures to find the distance, expensive cameras to figure out when i dropped the ball..... Whilst we are tying down an uncertainty, the ball and floor have already done it.

When you get right down to it, we simply cannot know an exact time. We can never know an 'exact' anything, because now we need to discuss where the "ball" ends and where the "floor" begins on a molecular level. And no matter how much we agree, the uncertainty principle gets us in the end - we don't and can't know the exact location of fundamental particles. An "exact" anything ends up being a conceptual thing that we can't ever test.

But where i'm going with this is that we're kind of talking about the nature of understanding. We know the volume of a sphere if we know its radius, but how do we create the same sphere accurately? Our brains don't have a resolution, but the tools we use in reality do - reality itself quite possibly has a resolution. We think of minecraft as a blocky, low resolution simulation of an analogue reality. Similarly, i think maths is an 'analogue' (in that it can be "exact") simulation of a limited resolution reality - reality only looks analogue when you don't look very closely.

All that is to say, we DO understand the ball dropping and hitting the floor, but "exactness" is a thing that only exists in the act itself. The only thing left for us to decide is what we consider accurate enough.

Perhaps "god" wanted to know what would happen if he set off a big bang. He sat down, calculated it all out in the language of the gods (the language of perfection; maths) and realised that due to uncertainty, the only way to know exactly what would happen was for it to actually happen. (Douglas Adams?)

Tags for this video have been changed from 'science, hyperspace travel, parties' to 'science, hyperspace travel, parties, Douglas, Adams' - edited by poolcleaner

That would be most excellent if we replaced all religious texts in the world with the works of Tolkein. Or Douglas Adams. There has gotta be a way to Replace All within the code of the universe!

I say things like that because they are objectively true. The very concept of omnipotence and omniscience violate all kinds of physical laws. They are paradoxes; the "immovable force meeting the immovable object", but all our experience and learning tells us the universe does not work like that. Again, we might be wrong, but the more we learn, the less likely it becomes that we've missed something so vast.

We haven't missed it, chaosengine; the vast majority of people on Earth believes there is a God.

Human history is full of misery, suffering and cruelty to everything around us. One of the few bright points is our quest for knowledge, and you willfully reject that to cling to a stone age belief system that has been demonstrably proven false (geocentricity, for example) again and again.

In every important way, man hasn't learned anything and hasn't changed at all. The misery and suffering in the world increases year by year, it doesn't decrease.

Factually, it's incorrect.
Morally, it's bankrupt and consistently on the wrong side of history.

Matthew 24:35

Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away.

One day you might wake up and realise (to paraphrase the much missed Douglas Adams) that "the garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it".

Until then, you are welcome to indulge in your fantasies, but if you insist on injecting your irrationality into debates like this, expect disagreement.

I've read most of Douglas Adams works. I grew up secular and you would probably be shocked at the level of agreement we would have had in the not too distant past. I have been set free from the bondage of slavery to sin, and have been born again into a living hope. What you know on its own profits you nothing, because without faith it is impossible to please God. Ask God to reveal Himself to you. You don't have to acknowledge it to me, but that is the only way you will ever know anything about God, is by His personal revelation to you. He is faithful to give you a revelation of your need for a Savior.

I say things like that because they are objectively true. The very concept of omnipotence and omniscience violate all kinds of physical laws. They are paradoxes; the "immovable force meeting the immovable object", but all our experience and learning tells us the universe does not work like that. Again, we might be wrong, but the more we learn, the less likely it becomes that we've missed something so vast.

Human history is full of misery, suffering and cruelty to everything around us. One of the few bright points is our quest for knowledge, and you willfully reject that to cling to a stone age belief system that has been demonstrably proven false (geocentricity, for example) again and again.

Factually, it's incorrect.
Morally, it's bankrupt and consistently on the wrong side of history.

One day you might wake up and realise (to paraphrase the much missed Douglas Adams) that "the garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it".

Until then, you are welcome to indulge in your fantasies, but if you insist on injecting your irrationality into debates like this, expect disagreement.

I was fortunate enough to meet Douglas Adams on the set of HGTTU in the 80's. I was an extra in those days, which supplemented my meagre income. I was the guard at the computer when the two guys ask the all important question. Also I was in the restaurant at the end of the universe episode. What did Adams say to me? Something profound or witty perhaps? Well, sadly not. He said, "excuse me," because I was standing in his way...
Still, it was good fun and I was receiving small amounts of repeat money for quite some time.

Well, it's not quite a new word, but Douglas Adams would call it being Total Perspective Vortexed.

Ridiculous!

"This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' -Douglas Adams