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Hitchhiker's Guide
Douglas Adam's comic work of science fiction, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, satirizes both society and science. As the story opens, protagonist Arthur Dent is railing against the local government for its decision to raze his home, which is in the way of highway construction. Dent argues that he was never made aware of the decision, though officials assure him the plans had been on display for a sufficient amount of time, albeit "on the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'"(Adams 2010, p. 9). Similarly, planet Earth is in the way of hyperspace bypass construction project, for which plans were also available for review. Bureaucratic red tape ensured the plans were never seen and Dent flees the planet with his alien friend Ford Prefect before it explodes. They hitchhike their way...
Interestingly, their book is in electronic format and can be read on a device "that looked rather like a largish electronic calculator…[with] a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million 'pages' could be summoned at a moment's notice" (Adams, p. 20). More than thirty years after Adams penned his work, the writer of this paper read it on a Kindle, a device remarkably like the one Adams described. Adams also described accessing music with a device that was "touch sensitive --…
Dent and Prefect travel through space by hitchhiking, picked up by spacecraft within the improbable nanosecond during which contact could possibly occur. They travel from planet to planet in a "nothingth of a second," making their travel faster than the speed of light, given the distances over which they traverse. Although this mode of travel has been theoretical supported by the theory of special relativity, it has obviously never been done except within the pages of books such as Adams's. In reality, it seems as improbable as Adams' physics of improbability.
Some of the science in Hitchhiker is accurate, or nearly so. Dent's alien friend is from a small planet "six hundred light-years away in the near vicinity of Betelgeuse" (Adams, p. 22); Betelgeuse is, in fact, 640 light-years from Earth. On page 26, the Vogons admonish Earthlings for failure to involve themselves in the "local" affairs of Alpha Centuri, "only" four light years away; Alpha Centuri is 4.4 light years away (Dickinson 1999, Tyson, Liu and Irion 2000). On page 60, Adams refers to "a nice hot cup of tea" as an example of a strong Brownian Motion producer. Brownian motion refers to the random movement of particles suspended in a fluid. Tea could, in fact, serve as an example.
Some of the science is deliberately ridiculous, such as the computer called the "Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain" (Adams, p. 60). Adams also blends science and satire. On page 33, he lets the alien Vogons debunk the theory of evolution by having them ignore nature and have elective surgery to "rectify the gross anatomical inconveniences" that made