42

Having chuckled through the Douglas Adams movie some time this weekend, Science & Technology Minister's choice of Business Day headline appealed to me: "South Africa helps to understand life, the universe and everything".

I quote Derek Hanekom: "Through our increasing mastery of the two disciplines of palaeontology and astronomy, we are fast becoming the world’s leaders on unveiling the mysteries of the past — how the universe came to be, what made us what we are today and what significance this knowledge may have for our decisions about our future."

... if only...

We made our mark in the field of palaeontology when an eminent scholar from Wits University, Prof Lee Berger, and his team made the remarkable discovery at the Cradle of Humankind of two fossil skeletons of a previously unknown hominid species, now known as Australopithecus sediba. These early ancestors of ours lived in the area about 2-million years ago.

Last year, on Africa Day, South Africa was announced as the host country for the lion’s share of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope, one of the great science projects of the 21st century. This project is so huge that the SKA central computer will have the processing power of about 100-million personal computers, and the dishes of the SKA will produce 10 times the data of present global internet traffic. The SKA will be far more sensitive than any existing telescope.

It will serve as a giant magnet for science in South Africa.  It will enable scientists to address fundamental, unanswered questions about our universe, including about the formation and evolution of stars, galaxies and quasars and the nature of gravity and dark matter, and it may even answer the perennial question: is there intelligent life out there?




 Back to Douglas Adams!Quoting Fit the Seventh of the radio series, on Christmas Eve, 1978:
Narrator: There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory, which states that this has already happened.

There is the persistent tale that 42 is Adams' tribute to the indefatigable paperback book, and is the average number of lines on an average page of an average paperback. Another common guess is that 42 refers to the number of laws in cricket, a recurring theme of the books. Douglas Adams was asked many times why he chose the number 42. Many theories were proposed, including that 42 is 101010 in binary code, that light refracts off water by 42 degrees to create a rainbow, that light requires 10⁻⁴² seconds to cross the diameter of a proton. Adams rejected them all.



Adams - 1994: "Everybody was looking for hidden meanings and puzzles and significances in what I had written. So I thought that just for a change I would actually construct a puzzle and see how many people solved it. Of course, nobody paid it any attention. I think that's terribly significant."

To thwart all attempts at taking this particular blog post any more seriously than is advisable at 01:32 on a Monday morning, my favouritest concept of all:

After mice, the second most intelligent species on Earth were the dolphins.

The dolphins had long known of the impending demolition of Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger...The last ever dolphins message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double backward somersault through a hoop whilst whistling "The Star-Spangled Banner," but in fact the message was this: "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish."

My point exactly? As data explodes and information overflows, spare a thought for humor :)