Douglas Adams May Have Had It Right

[Questman]

Has anybody else noticed any similarity between Douglas Adams' Infinite Improbability Drive And Quantum Mechanics?

 

[RandallB]

Are you being funny and cute at the same time by extending on the work of a sci-fi comedy writer?

If you’re suggesting Adams has anything to do with “real” science; that best fits with the meaning of another book title “Not Even Wrong” as just another level of comedy.
Similar to the Peter Woit description & claim of String Theory as something of a bad joke.
At least his writing is intended as science.
Adams intends his stuff to be read as fiction and comedy fiction at that.

 

[NateTG]

Adams intends his stuff to be read as fiction and comedy fiction at that.

Although Adams is known for comedic sci-fi, "Last Chance to See" is neither comedy, nor fiction.

 

[setAI]

well- it turns out that Adam's IID is actually something you could program a robust computer or hypercomputer to do- if you could build one- and an idealized quantum computer would provide a source of hypercomputation as a transfinite or infinite state Turing machine [ http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0209332 ]an observer with direct access to a hypercomputer could program it to search for and access world-states where some desired result existed along with a copy of the observer's state within the local state computed- this would be the equivalent of 'transferring' the observer into the quantum simulation of that world-state and to them it would seem exactly like moving to that space in 'reality'- from the perspective of Unitary Quantum Mechanics the simulated quantum state would actually be an 'analog' computation of a real parallel universe- so Douglas wasn't just being creative- something like an IID is actually achievable - certainly more achievable than more mundane sci-fi ideas like FTL starships are!