Home > bbc >

Watch The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Episodes Online

Episodes of the hit series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are now online to watch in full. This is the classic british series that turned into a cult classic. The whole series lasts 6 episodes long.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is based on the best-selling novel by Douglas Adams, this cult series features spectacular visual trickery and a generous helping of zany humour (perhaps from the Restaurant at the Edge of the Universe). Audiences will love it, sci-fi fans or not.

Watch The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Online
Via this link

--> Posts related to Watch The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Episodes Online

Watch The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers Episodes Online

Watch The Tatami Galaxy Episodes Online

Watch the Galaxy Railways Online, Full Episodes

Watch Galaxy Express 999 Episodes Online

Watch The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers – s2 | e34 – Mothmoose Online

Leave a Comment

If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.

LOVE him!

Clink the link for more

« Clues to the Fate of the Universe? The 'Great Wall' & Clustered Beauty of Hydra A | Main

January 20, 2010

Stephen Hawking & 'The Hitchhiker's Guide' - Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Life? (A Galaxy Classic)

In what is becoming to be one of the worst misuses of science since electronics ended up in Sammy the Singing Sea Bass, defenders of "Intelligent Design" increasingly abuse both words and the anthropic principle to "prove" the existence of God.  

Many of our greatest scientists have been asking why does the universe appear to fe "fine-tuned" for life? The logic behind this question, sometimes known as the anthropic principle, says that we are here today, able to study the universe and learn about its laws. But if any of these were much different, we could never have come in to exist in the first place.

Scientists study why fundamental values of the universe like the gravitational constant or the mass of an electron are what they are. The anthropic principle states that these values can only be observed if they're such that observers can exist to do so.  You'll notice that this is perfectly true but doesn't actually advance the issue, and certainly isn't proof that an invisible man spent a few millenia tuning the basic interactions of physics to eventually create something that looked like him thirteen billion years later, in the most complicated bio-cosmic Rube Goldberg machine possible.

The way the values are exactly those required for life as we know it unnecessarily surprises far too many people. Of course any life will be perfectly suited to the universe it's in - almost as if that's where it bloody happened, and in fact every process leading to anything called life is utterly dependent on succeeding in the local environment.  It's like being amazed how well water fits into gills - surely the structure of H2O is perfectly engineered by an omnipotent fishgod for his faithful marine subjects!

People who say slightly different values would prevent life only betray their total lack of imagination: they can conceive of an entirely alternate universe with fundamentally different physics, but the idea that maybe different things would happen in a different universe?  Madness!  Insisting on carbon constructions when there's an infinity of possible existences to play with?  It's like going to the Library of Congress and maintaining that something's only a book if it's about Peter Rabbit, because that's the first one you read..

This is where we're usually accused of being anti-religion.  We're not.  Faith provides a wonderful support for countless millions, as well as parts of a moral system which would probably be really good if people would use it right.  But we are against religion interfering with science.  No lab-coated lunatic has ever burst into a church towing a mass spectrometer demanding to analyze the Eucharist. So sermonizers shouldn't stuff up the gears of actual progress because they've decided their faith isn't actually strong enough to withstand other people thinking differently.

Unfortunately we're going to keep seeing complete logical breaks like this quote: 

"Hawking and his colleagues presented the mathematical details in a formal paper that supports the anthropic principle. In other words, the universe is adapted for a purpose and that purpose is life."  

Can you spot where the author helpfully explains what those silly scientists really meant?  You should always be extremely suspicious of "this means" and "in other words."  

When we really get education working, everyone will spot such logical fallacies and make their own minds up.  Until then we'll have shouting matches started by those who pick a position first and then choose their evidence afterwards.

We at The Daily Galaxy think Douglas Adams nailed the issue in The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

“The Babel fish,” said The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quietly, “is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy not from its carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. 

The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

“Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

“The argument goes something like this: `I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’

“`But,’ says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’

“`Oh dear,’ says God, `I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.

“`Oh, that was easy,’ says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

Luke McKinney with Casey Kazan

Source: http://www.thesunnews.com/opinion/story/1192709.html

Posted at 01:30 AM | Permalink

Comments

As long as you only look at the universe and it's wonder through colored glasses you won't see the truth. By the way, there is only one Truth.

If you want to be open minded check out Barry Setterfield's original work on VSL (variable speed of light) or if you like philosophy better, check out "abiogenesis".

Good hunting...

Posted by: boxedin | January 20, 2010 at 05:59 AM

Verify your Comment

Previewing your Comment

Posted by:  | 

This is only a preview. Your comment has not yet been posted.

Your comment could not be posted. Error type:

Your comment has been posted. Post another comment

The letters and numbers you entered did not match the image. Please try again.

As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This prevents automated programs from posting comments.

Having trouble reading this image? View an alternate.

« Clues to the Fate of the Universe? The 'Great Wall' & Clustered Beauty of Hydra A | Main

Eggstacy! Click the link for more!

« The Daily Flash -Eco, Space, Tech (12/23) | Main | MIT: "Creating a Robot So Alive You Feel Bad About Switching It Off" -A Galaxy Classic »

December 24, 2009

Douglas Adams We Miss You! Will There Ever Be Another "Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy"?

It has now been thirty years since October 12, 1979 when The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novelization of a popular British radio series, first saw print. Douglas Adams, our icon of humorous geek literature, would write four sequels to it, and would, tragically die of a heart attack at the age of 49.

In the first novel and radio series, a group of "hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings" in the form of mice demand to learn the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything from Deep Thought, the supercomputer, specially built for this purpose. It takes Deep Thought 7½ million years to compute and check the answer, which turns out to be 42. Unfortunately, the Ultimate Question itself is unknown.

When asked to produce The Ultimate Question, the computer says that it cannot; however, it can help to design an even more powerful computer that can -that computer is Earth. The programmers then embark on a further ten-million-year program to discover The Ultimate Question but the process is hindered after eight million years by the unexpected arrival on Earth of the Golgafrinchans and then is ruined completely, five minutes before completion, when the Earth is destroyed by the Vogons to make way for a new Hyperspace Bypass. This is later revealed to have been a trick by a consortium of psychiatrists, led by Gag Halfrunt, who feared for the loss of their careers when the meaning of life became known.

Lacking a real question, the mice decide not to go through the whole thing again and settle for  "How many roads must a man walk down?" from Bob Dylan's protest song "Blowin' in the Wind".

But WTF, Douglas Adams really did nail it! Once again, art anticipates science: after pondering the weighty question of the mass of the Milky Way galaxy, astronomers have come up with an answer: 42! Our galaxy weighs three times 10 to the power of 42 kilograms - a number written as 3 followed by 42 zeroes.

It seems esoteric but knowing the weight of the galaxy - the amount of matter it contains - is key to solving the nature of so-called dark matter. Unlike the "ordinary matter" of stars and planets, scientists have only hunches about the nature of the invisible material that, along with "dark energy", they estimate makes up 90-99 per cent of the universe.

What is it? How is it distributed across the universe? Does it really even exist? "That's worth knowing," said Professor Freeman,an astrophysicist with Mount Stromlo Observatory and the Australian National University's Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Canberra said  in an interview with The Australian. So along with colleagues in Australia, Europe, the US and Britain, he decided to "weigh" a galaxy.

The problem is there's no good way to quantify all the dark matter in distant galaxies, thus making it difficult to total all the matter, dark and ordinary. So Freeman and his colleagues focused on our home galaxy, the Milky Way, an average sized spiral galaxy, containing a few hundred billion stars (keep in mind that there are some 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, each containing more or less the same number of stars).

It has been determined that there is a roughly spherical halo of dark material stretching out to distances of perhaps 10 times as far from the center of the galaxy as we are.
"Because we're inside our galaxy, we can get a more reliable measure of the dark matter content than we can for galaxies outside," he said.

To do so, the group first estimated the "escape velocity" of the galaxy - the speed stars passing near the sun needed to attain in order to escape its gravitational pull. It did so using the line-of-sight, or radial, velocity of stars crossing the central rotating disc of the galaxy.

The data was collected by the 1.2m Schmidt Telescope of the Anglo-Australian Observatory at Siding Spring, NSW. The escape velocity, calculated at between 544km/sec and 608km/sec, allowed the team to calculate the Milky Way's mass and weight, as well as the amount of dark matter: 94 per cent.

Wow...that's cool! We think Professor Freeman and team should be awarded the "Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster Prize for Extreme Cleverness."

Casey Kazan & team.

Posted at 12:28 AM in Science Fiction | Permalink

Email this post

Comments

Verify your Comment

Previewing your Comment

Posted by:  | 

This is only a preview. Your comment has not yet been posted.

Your comment could not be posted. Error type:

Your comment has been posted. Post another comment

The letters and numbers you entered did not match the image. Please try again.

As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This prevents automated programs from posting comments.

Having trouble reading this image? View an alternate.

« The Daily Flash -Eco, Space, Tech (12/23) | Main | MIT: "Creating a Robot So Alive You Feel Bad About Switching It Off" -A Galaxy Classic »

There'll never be another Douglas that's for sure!