In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the book by Douglas Adams, a machine made interstellar travel possible by nudging nature toward extremely improbable, but not impossible, events. A new ...

Last week's virtual demo of D-Wave’s proof-of-concept quantum computer has of course been greeted with quite a bit of skepticism. Regardless, any developments that increase our knowledge – or simply ...

The name of the first Mars-bound SpaceX craft will be named The Heart of Gold, in honor of the spaceship commandeered by Zaphod Beeblebrox in Douglas Adams’s mega-famous science fiction novel The ...

In view of the success of Douglas Adams’s Infinite Improbability Drive, which allows instant access to all points of his universe, it seems to me that a little tweaking could produce a Totally ...

You mention the line of argument which says that since our early universe had low entropy, and since this is inherently unlikely, it must be one among a multiverse of other universes (28 April, p 33).