What Was He Like, Douglas Adams?
“He was tall, very tall. He had an air of cheerful diffidence. He combined a razor-sharp intellect and understanding of what he was doing with the puzzled look of someone who had backed into a profession that surprised him in a world that perplexed him. And he gave the impression that, all in all, he was rather enjoying it.
He was a genius, of course. It’s a word that gets tossed around a lot these days, and it’s used to mean pretty much anything. But Douglas was a genius, because he saw the world differently, and more importantly, he could communicate the world he saw. Also, once you’d seen it his way you could never go back”
—Extract of Foreword of HHGTTG by Neil Gaiman, January 2002
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy definition of the word Infinite.
Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real “wow, that’s big,” time. Infinity is just so big that, by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we’re trying to get across here.
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 which states that this has already happened.
— Douglas Adams on “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”
The Babel Fish is a small yellow fish, by putting this into one’s ear one can instantly understand anything said in any language; this is how Arthur Dent is able to understand the other beings he encounters on his travels. The Babel fish has lead to important profound consequences for the Universe; apart from the philosophical implications the Babel fish has started more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
