Skip to main content

Slashdot: Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy: New Research Says #42 Really Is Our Number

Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy: New Research Says #42 Really Is Our Number
Published on January 31, 2021 at 11:04PM
Just 11 months before his death in 2001, famous author Douglas Adams answered questions from Slashdot readers. And Slashdot reader Informativity still remembers how Adams (also a Doctor Who script editor) had included a supercomputer named Deep Thought in his first book which spent 7.5 million years to determine that the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, was...the number 42: Turns out the entire universe is a product of the number 42, specifically 42 times the collection of lm/2t, such that l, m and t are the Planck Units. In a newly published paper, Measurement Quantization Describes the Physical Constants , both the constants and laws of nature are resolved from a simple geometry between two frames of reference, the non-discrete Target Frame of the universe and the discrete Measurement Frame of the observer. Its only and primary connection to our physical reality is a scalar, 42. Forty-two is what defines our universe from say any other version of our universe. So, while Douglas Adams may have just been picking numbers out of the sky when writing Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it turns out he picked the right number, the one that defines ... well ... everything. In addition to presenting new descriptions for most of the physical constants (descriptions that don't reference other physical constants), the paper is also noted for presenting a classical unification of gravity and electromagnetism. One more interesting piece of trivia. Wikipedia reminds us that in January 2004, asteroid 2001 DA42 was given the permanent name 25924 Douglasadams... Brian G. Marsden, the director of the Minor Planet Center and the secretary for the naming committee, remarked that, with even his initials in the provisional designation, "This was sort of made for him, wasn't it?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Slashdot: Battery Fires At Recycling Centres Are Costing the UK £1bn a Year

Battery Fires At Recycling Centres Are Costing the UK £1bn a Year Published on 2026-08-23T00:29:00Z Wrongly discarded lithium batteries, such as those in vapes, are causing more than 10 fires a week at U.K. recycling centers, according to figures shared with the Guardian: The Environment Services Association (ESA), the trade body for waste management companies, said its members had reported 1,518 fires in the year to March 2026. At least 541 of these fires were directly attributed to lithium ion batteries, the survey found. There were a further 216 battery fires in bin lorries [garbage trucks]. The ESA said the reported number of battery-related fires underestimated the scale of the problem, because in most incidents it was impossible to determine the cause of the blaze. A spokesperson said: "We know 40% of fires at recycling centres are caused by batteries, but we think the actual number is more like 70%." It estimates that annual cost of these fires has increased from ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Slashdot: How the FSF Sysadmins are Blocking Botnets with reaction

How the FSF Sysadmins are Blocking Botnets with reaction Published on 2026-07-11T21:47:00Z For nearly two years the Free Software Foundation has been fighting web crawlers (including many aggressively scraping training data for AI models). A botnet controlling about five million IPs hit one system for six months in 2025. Their systems administrator wrote this week that they view these as distributed denial-of-service attacks. How are they fighting back? We noticed patterns in the scrapers that were abnormal, which gave us material for writing regular expressions. Searching for the regular expression then gave us a large lists of IP addresses. Looking up the origin of those IP addresses revealed that some of the crawlers were using botnets of residential IP addresses to scrape faster and avoid detection. We looked for what kinds of botnets might be generating the kind of traffic that we were seeing, and one that we suspected was called the "Vo1d" botnet, comprised of sma...
Post a Comment
Read more

Slashdot: AT&T Outlines $250 Billion US Investment Plan To Boost Infrastructure In AI Age

AT&T Outlines $250 Billion US Investment Plan To Boost Infrastructure In AI Age Published on 2026-03-10T20:00:00Z AT&T plans to invest more than $250 billion over the next five years to expand U.S. telecom infrastructure for the AI age. The company says it will also hire thousands of technicians while partnering with AST SpaceMobile to extend coverage to remote areas. Reuters reports: Rapid adoption of artificial intelligence, cloud computing and connected devices has prompted telecom operators to invest heavily in fiber and 5G networks as they also seek to fend off intensifying competition from cable broadband providers. AT&T, which has about 110,000 employees in the U.S., said the new hires will help build and maintain its infrastructure. The outlay includes capital expenditure and other spending, the company said. The spending will focus on expanding its fiber and wireless networks, including accelerating deployment of fiber broadband, 5G home internet and satellite co...
Post a Comment
Read more