حالا که داریم راجع به سوال نهایی فکر میکنیم، چرا این احتمال رو در نظر نگیریم که اصلا سوال نهایی وجود واقعی نداره؟ همه‌مون سرکاریم مونامی.
زندگی شبیه چیه؟ جوابی که بهش میدی فقط جهان بینی تو رو نشون نمیده ،بلکه صریحا روی بقیه ثانیه ها و صدم ثانیه‌های زندگیت هم تاثیر میذاره و اونو میسازه. تو میگی زندگی مثل یه پارک تفریحیه و میخوای هم از تونل وحشتش لذت ببری و هم پارک آبی‌ش. اون میگه زندگی مثل تبعید شدن به باغ عدنه و انسان مگنوم اوپس، که باید دل خالق رو بدست بیاره تا دوباره به جایگاه آسمانیش برگرده.
از نظر منم زندگی یه درامای انسانی از رنج ابدی و بدبختی، عشق، هوس، جنون و سرکشیه که توسط یک نمایشنامه نویس گیج نوشته شده و روی یک صحنه عظیم پر از هرج و مرج داره اجرا میشه.
بازیگرا اونقدر بی‌اهمیت ان که فراموش و رها شدن. کاملا رها شده ،از یاد رفته. هیچکس این دراما رو تماشا نمیکنه، این نمایش برای هیچ موجودی توی کائنات ذره ای اهمیت یا جذابیت نداره. شاید هم اونها بارها و بارها با سفینه هاشون از کنار این پلات رد شدن و نیم نگاهی ام بهش انداختن ،اما با خودشون گفتن این موجودات زشت دوپا و یک سر خیلی احمق بنظر میان، بعیده اونقدر بهره هوشی داشته باشن که بتونن سرمونو گرم کنن، پس گاز بده زودتر به پارتی برسیم.
نمایشنامه نویس هم توی همون پارتی انقدر نوشیده که یگوشه لایعقل افتاده.هرکی رد میشه یه تیپا بهش میزنه.

این ایده‌ای که گفتم منو به غایت خشمگین و عصبی میکنه، جوری که مجبورم سرمو توی بالشت فرو کنم فریاد بزنم و مشت بکوبم تا مغزم مثل نارنجک منفجر نشه. من میخوام غم من، رنج من، خشم من توی تمام جهان منعکس بشه. اونقدر بزرگ هست که بخوام تمام موجودات کائنات براش مویه کنن. من میخوام مرگ اونها برای دقیقه‌ای هم که شده مهمترین مسله جهان باشه. اما واقعیت اینه که این رنج هرچقدر هم حقیقی باشه یا حداقل من فکر کنم حقیقیه، توی جهان هیچکسی انعکاس نداره. این خیلی خیلی ترسناکه. من برای نمایشنامه نویس اهمیتی ندارم . تو هم نداری. ما همونقدر مهمیم که جلبک کف رودخونه. حتی مطمعن نیستم جلبک مهمتره یا نه.
آرزو میکنم همه تون توی این وحشت با من شریک باشید و عذاب بکشید.
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خوشبخت‌ترین موجودات کیهان از نظر من ساکنان سیاره کریکیت‌ان. اون مردم دراز رنگ پریده‌ی رمانتیک که علی‌رغم قیافه‌های افسرده و نگاههای رو به پایین، آوازهای شاد میخونن و به هیچی فکر نمیکنن یا نمیکردن.
سیاره کریکیت تا ابد تو یه حباب محبوسه که زمان و زندگی در اون بی‌نهایت آهسته می‌گذره. همه اشعه‌های نورِ دور و بر این حباب منحرف می‌شن تا حباب و سیاره داخل اون از چشم‌ها پنهان بمونن و هیچکی نتونه وارد اون‌ها بشه. امکان فرار از این حباب وجود نداره، مگر این‌که کسی از بیرون قفل اون رو باز کنه.
وقتی که بقیه جهان و کائنات به پایان نهاییِ خود می‌رسن و تمامِ عالم نفس‌های آخر خودش رو می‌کشه (البته این ایده مربوط به زمانی بود که مردم هنوز نمی‌دونستند که پایان جهان فقط یه بیزنس رستوران‌داریه) و زندگی و ماده برای همیشه از بین می‌ره، سیاره کریکیت و خورشید اون از حباب زمانی بیرون می‌ان و خوشحال از وجود نداشتن هیچ‌چیز دیگه‌ای غیر از کریکیت به زندگی مطلوب‌شون ادامه می‌دن.
کلید قفل این حباب روی یه سیارک کار گذاشته شده که در مداری بزرگ‌ دور حباب می‌چرخه. کلید سمبل کهکشانه: دروازه ویکیت.
اگه می خوایید بدونید این مونگولا چجوری از حبابشون بیرون میان و قراره چه بلائی سر کل کیهان بیارن، بهتره خودتون کتابو بخونید .
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نه به بدی جلد یک بود و نه به خوبی جلد دو. اما ناامیدم نکرد...

I really and truly enjoy the craziness of these books!
Douglas Adams turns the most mundane things into an extraordinary adventure with laughs all the way through.

42? Really? I don't think so!

Maybe 2.5 stars. Half the time I didn't understand what the hell was happening. These books are usually a little crazy and over the top, but this one was specially weird.
I'm giving it a 3 star rating, because of the audiobook. Martin Freeman's narration made this really enjoyable and I laughed out loud a lot of times. Arthur is still an amazing character, not much change about the way he's written but still my favorite.

«سکندری خورد و رفت که بخوره زمین اما چون تو این لحظه ذهنش به هزار چیز دیگه مشغول بود، کاملا فراموش کرد که بخوره زمین و به همین دلیل به زمین نخورد.»
این کتاب جلد سوم کتاب راهنمای کهکشان برای اتواستاپ زن هاست. هر جلدی که میگذره کتاب قشنگ تر ، پرکشش تر و ناب تر میشه .
ترجمه‌ی آرش سرکوهی رو با زبان اصلی مقایسه کردم. واقعا آرش سرکوهی جوری گل کاشته که اصلا پشیمون نیستم که کتاب رو ترجمه خوندم.‌
سه جلد اول رو پشت سرهم خوندم و برای شروع کردن جلد چهارم و پنجم بشدت ذهنم خسته ست و نیاز به یک استراحت دو هفتگی برای ادامه دادن دارم .

( پایان بازخوانی دوم )...
.
همون شیوایی متن، همون طنز محشر، همون موضوع عالی، همون مفهوم عمیق و همون داستان علمی کاملی که در جلدهای اول و دوم وجود داشت، با غلظتی بیشتر توی جلد سوم هم وجود داشت.

واقعا میگم، داگلاس آدامز یک نویسنده‌ی محشر و دیوانه‌ست

The only thing I didn't like about this book was it's lack of Zaphod Beeblebrox.

How can you go wrong with the zany mind of author Douglas Adams? Arthur, living alone on prehistoric Earth, decides happily to himself that he will go mad and announces it to the empty world. Ford, who unexpectedly reappears after being gone for four years, tells Arthur that he went mad for a while and it did him a lot of good. I loved Ford’s description of his bout of self-imposed madness: n  “And then I decided I was a lemon for a couple of weeks. I kept myself amused all that time jumping in and out of a gin and tonic.”n and n  “I found a small lake that thought it was a gin and tonic and jumped in and out of that. At least, I think it thought it was a gin and tonic.” n Then, Arthur and Ford proceed to chase an irrational sofa through time and a cricket match. Weird enough for you yet? That’s only the first few pages of the book…

Maybe it’s the Mathematician in me, but how can you not love the theory of the non-absolute number for the given time of arrival: n  “A number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. In other words, the given time of arrival is the one moment of time at which it is impossible that any member of the party will arrive.”n?

In chapter 7, a mattress called Zem and Marvin, the depressed robot, have a conversation. I doubt there are any other books out there that feature conversations between mattresses and robots. It does seem like something that I would dream about at night, though… In chapter 17, we learn about the editor that has been out-to-lunch for the last century and about apologizing in sports to your opponent via megaphone. It’s all so very random.

I wish I could share with you the entry on how to fly inside the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but I really don’t want to spoil it for you in case you read the book yourself. I’ve already shared too much as is. Really, you must read this book. I implore you to read it. The madness must be shared! *happy sigh* I adore the lunacy of Douglas Adams ;)

People may have noticed that I've recently become very interested in theories of physics which involve multiple universes. I've spent a fair amount of time over the last few weeks reading about them and discussing the ideas.

Since it's buried in one of my other reviews, let me present my conclusions explicitly. To my surprise, I discover that there is a great deal of evidence to support the claim that we are only one of many universes, and, moreover, that we know what these other universes are. The theory isn't particularly flaky or speculative. Or, to be more exact, there is an abundance of flaky and speculative theories, but there is also one which is rooted in mainstream science and already comes close to explaining Life, the Universe and Everything. The idea is simple. There is a way of looking at quantum mechanics - the so-called Many Worlds Interpretation - which, roughly, means that everything which might have happened actually did happen in some alternate universe. These alternate universes are as just real as ours.

Now, one's first reaction to this ought to be that it's nonsense, or at best no more than playing with words. It's easy to say that what might have been is real, but does that actually mean anything? Well, it turns out there is a strong argument which supports the claim that many universes exist. When you look at the different physical constants - things like the strength of gravity, the strength of the electromagnetic force, the relative masses of the proton and the electron, and so on - a weird pattern emerges. There is no known reason why any of these constants should have the values they possess. They appear to be arbitrary numbers. But, if these numbers were even slightly different, life would be completely impossible. The most straightforward way to explain this fact is to suppose that there are many universes, with many different settings for the constants; we happen to live in one of the very few universes where the numbers came out right for life to happen. This argument is presented in detail in Martin Rees's n  Before the Beginningn.

Next, let's look at the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics (MWI). Everyone who reads SF novels has heard of this, but I had always dismissed it as a fringe theory with little credibility. I was surprised to learn from Brian Greene's n  The Hidden Realityn that the MWI has steadily been gaining ground over the last 30 years, and is now considered completely respectable. As Greene explains, everyone agrees on the mathematical theory behind quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation. People know how to do the calculations, and these calculations work spectacularly well. The disagreement is about what the equations actually mean. Greene, and other people you can easily find on the Web, say that the MWI is in fact the simplest and most natural way to give intuitive significance to the mathematics of quantum physics; the traditional "Copenhagen interpretation" due to Niels Bohr and his colleagues is close to mysticism when you try to pin it down, since it makes the human observer an integral part of physics. Quantum physicists are sufficiently uneasy about the choices that the most popular approach is not to ascribe any meaning to the mathematics, but just perform the calculations without asking what they refer to. This is evidently an unusual way to do science.

To summarize, the most natural way to interpret our mainstream scientific theory is to say that there are many alternate universes. The physical evidence also suggests that there are many alternate universes. If the notion weren't so startling, one would just conclude that, since theory and experiment coincide, there must be many alternate universes.

There are plenty of loose ends to tie up, and you can question the logic in several places. (Robert has done a good job of presenting the case for the defense in the comment thread to my Greene review). I still can't quite bring myself to believe it emotionally, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. The other explanations are even more far-fetched; as Sherlock Holmes says, once you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true. Check it out for yourself and see if you agree.
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Looking around for material on the Many Worlds Interpretation, I found a paper by Max Tegmark where the following interesting passage appears:

Is there ... any experiment that could distinguish between ... the MWI and the Copenhagen interpretation using currently available technology? The author can only think of one: a form of quantum suicide in a spirit similar to so-called quantum roulette. It requires quite a dedicated experimentalist, since it is amounts to an iterated and faster version of Schrödinger's cat experiment with you as the cat.

The apparatus is a "quantum gun" which each time its trigger is pulled measures the z-spin of a particle. It is connected to a machine gun that fires a single bullet if the result is "down" and merely makes an audible click if the result is "up". The details of the trigger mechanism are irrelevant (an experiment with photons and a half-silvered mirror would probably be cheaper to implement) as long as the timescale between the quantum bit generation and the actual firing is much shorter than that characteristic of human perception, say 0.01 seconds. The experimenter first places a sand bag in front of the gun and tells her assistant to pull the trigger ten times. [Everyone] agrees that the "shut-up-and-calculate" prescription applies here, and predict that she will hear a seemingly random sequence of shots and duds such as "bang-click-bang-bang-bang-click-clickbang-click-click." She now instructs her assistant to pull the trigger ten more times and places her head in front of the gun barrel. This time the shut-up-and-calculate recipe is inapplicable, since probabilities have no meaning for an observer in the dead state, and the contenders will differ in their predictions. In interpretations where there is an explicit non-unitary collapse, she will be either dead or alive after the first trigger event, so she should expect to perceive perhaps a click or two (if she is moderately lucky), then "game over", nothing at all.

In the MWI, on the other hand, the state after the first trigger event is [...] Since there is exactly one observer having perceptions both before and after the trigger event, and since it occurred too fast to notice, the MWI prediction is that [the experimenter] will hear "click" with 100% certainty. When her assistant has completed his unenviable assignment, she will have heard ten clicks, and concluded that collapse interpretations of quantum mechanics are ruled out at a confidence level of 99.9%. If she wants to rule them out at "ten sigma", she need merely increase n by continuing the experiment a while longer. Occasionally, to verify that the apparatus is working, she can move her head away from the gun and suddenly hear it going off intermittently.

Note, however, that almost all terms in the final superposition will have her assistant perceiving that he has killed his boss. Many physicists would undoubtedly rejoice if an omniscient genie appeared at their death bed, and as a reward for life-long curiosity granted them the answer to a physics question of their choice. But would they be as happy if the genie forbade them from telling anybody else? Perhaps the greatest irony of quantum mechanics is that if the MWI is correct, then the situation is quite analogous if, once you feel ready to die, you repeatedly attempt quantum suicide: you will experimentally convince yourself that the MWI is correct, but you can never convince anyone else!

But is Tegmark really correct in saying that the experimenter would not convince anyone else of the correctness of the MWI? Imagine that you are the assistant in the universe where the experimenter succeeds in cheating death 100 times in a row, after having explained what she is about to do. I, at least, would find this convincing. I wouldn't be able to repeat the experiment (only the person risking their life can do that), but it would still seem way too strange to ascribe to pure chance.

It seems to me that the argument about lucky settings in the physical constants making life possible is related to Tegmark's thought experiment with the quantum gun. We have all been the beneficiaries of, in effect, a long string of clicks, as opposed to bullets. The question is whether this is good evidence of the existence of other quantum worlds. I can see that opinions are divided!
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So I was chatting with a CERN physicist today (imagine other people peacefully knitting in the background), and I took the opportunity to ask him why the picture I describe above isn't the standard one.

"Well, it is more or less the standard one!" he said. "At least among cosmologists."

"In that case..." I began, but he cut me short.

"However, it's not the standard picture among theoretical particle physicists," he continued. "And for experimental particle physicists, it's a yet another picture."

"But... if they all know they have different pictures of what's happening, why don't they discuss it until they've agreed which is right?" I asked helplessly.

That CERN shrug again. It's starting to look familiar.

Band 3 der vierbändigen Trilogie in fünf Teilen 'Per Anhalter durch die Galaxis' gibt ein ähnlich rasantes Tempo vor, wie die Vorgänger. Arthur Dent, eine der passivsten Figuren in der Literaturgeschichte, will eigentlich nur seine Ruhe, aber leider ist 1) seine Zuhause (der gesamte Planet) gesprengt worden und die Rückkehr ist damit so ziemlich unmöglich und 2) gerät er zufällig von einer absurden Situation in die nächste, dieses Mal sind es Krikkit-Kriege, die wieder auszubrechen drohen.

Wer jetzt an Cricket denken musste, hat genau richtig gedacht. Bei den Briten hat sich die tiefsitzende kollektive Erinnerung an diesen intergalaktischen Völkermord in Form einer Sportart manifestiert, die der Rest der Galaxis als furchtbar langweilig betrachtet. Das nimmt den mordenden Krikkit-Robotern aber nichts von ihrer kalten Bosheit, im Gegenteil, für mich machte diese bizarre Verbindung diesen Teil der Geschichte noch einmal besonders trostlos.

Adams schafft es, trotz scheinbaren Chaos', obwohl man glauben könnte, er schreibe nach der Devise 'anything goes', trotzdem logisches Storytelling zu betreiben. Ein Exkurs über eine kriegerische Daseinsform, sie zum Stressabbau auf unschuldige Kartoffelsäcke eindrischt? Äußerst plotrelevant und alles andere als langweilig. Und obwohl ich die Geschichte teilweise bedrückend empfand, hat Adams am Ende doch nicht die Hoffnung aufgegeben. Der Schrecken hat auch ein Ende, zumindest ein vorläufiges.
Zwei weitere Bände hat er schließlich noch geschrieben. Ein sechster wurde von einem Kollegen aus Notizen zusammengezimmert.

My rating simply reflects my enjoyment of the novel.

I get the humor, but I didn't laugh. There were several clever little plot sequences and lines, but nothing much more than that, it seems. The first book presented some great ideas. The second book presented, more or less, two good ideas. The third book... I couldn't find anything worthwhile. Please do comment below if you noticed something I didn't, because I really don't want to set down this book without gaining anything from it.

Probably the only book in the universe that is both centred on cricket and really comical!

In this third volume of the Trilogy of Five, Arthur Dent has spent five harrowing years in his cave on prehistoric Earth. Ford pops out of nowhere, and they travel in time to Lord’s Cricket Ground, just as England win the Ashes. Arthur and Ford end up fleeing a chaotic scene on board Slartibartfast’s cleverly disguised spaceship. And the adventure begins!

In his usual laugh-out-loud style, Douglas Adams tells an astonishing story centred around cricket, its wickets, a Golden Bail buried deep within the Heart of Gold, and a Key that needs protecting.

We discover the Krikkit Wars, sentimental robots, the power of reincarnation, the paradoxes of time travel and restaurant bills, the knack of flying, a 4-generation cosmic party, Zem the floopily flobbering globbering mattress, not to mention Trillian’s level-headedness and Arthur Dent’s dismal bowling skills.

—

The format is great, with short, funny chapters.

The plot is slightly more elaborate than in his previous books. Simon Brett, who produced the pilot episode of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, says in the preface “‘Life, the Universe and Everything’ is the book in which Douglas gets closest to actually having a plot.”

I enjoyed this book, even though it didn’t quite work as well for me as the previous two did (so it’s a 3.5 rounded up).

“Life the Universe and Everything” is both the logical and absurd sequel to “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”, bearing the distinctive hallmarks of Adams’ clever mix of nonsense, play on words and deeper thought.

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