From: metzler@pablo.physics.lsa.umich.edu (Chris Metzler)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.douglas-adams
Subject: On Infinite Universes and _Mostly Harmless_  (SPOILERS!)
Date: 13 Nov 1992 19:53:15 GMT
Organization: University of Michigan Department
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: pablo.physics.lsa.umich.edu
Keywords: infinity, Mostly Harmless, Universes (individual)

I am posting this for a friend, Eric Schulman from the Astronomy
Department here, who is having problems with his pnews program . . .


From: eric@astro.lsa.umich.edu (Eric Schulman)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.douglas-adams
Subject: On Infinite Universes and _Mostly Harmless_  (SPOILERS!)
Distribution: world
Organization: University of Michigan Astronomy Department
Keywords: infinity, Mostly Harmless, Universes (individual)

	IMHO there are people from at least three universes (slices
of the WSOGMM, call them what you will) in the series now. For 
simplicity I will assume that the first four books stayed in the 
same universe, although this is not necessarily the case. In SLATFATF,
for example, Arthur returns to "Earth" to find his house still 
standing but he doesn't find another Arthur living there as one might
have expected if it were another universe (granted, in an infinite
number of universes there are some in which Arthur went on a skiing
holiday for a year and returned to wonder who had collected the mail
and why the folks in the pub thought that he had been around (after
the other Arthur and Fenchurch had left the planet with Ford) and 
why some of his chairs were broken). So I'll label the characters 
from the first four books with a -1 (ie: Arthur-1). Then we have
the universe of the four-leaf clovers and Tricia becoming a TV
Anchor (-2). We do not meet Arthur-2, nor Ford-2, because they didn't
leave the planet to escape from the Vogons (Ford-2 presumably left
the planet sometime but he probably didn't take Arthur and even if 
he did they would probably not have met up with Zaphod and Trillian
and later Slartibartfast (etc, etc, etc), although in an infinite
number of universes, anything is possible, including the Cathedral
of Chalism appearing out of "thin air" and levitating in the middle
of Lake Superior for 18.4 years). The Arthur in MH is probably not
Arthur-1 (he has an analog instead of a digital watch and he tells
Random that humans evolved on the Earth when the Arthur of RATEOTU
knew perfectly well that they had evolved on Golgafrinchim) and the 
Ford is probably not Ford-1 (who broke the necks of innocent forest 
creatures and took up cruelty to animals as a hobby and knew in
SLATFATF that his entire entry on the Earth was back on the net 
whereas in MH all he seems to know about is "Mostly Harmless"). 
	Perhaps they are Arthur-3 and Ford-3. Perhaps they are 
Arthur-33 and Ford-5668 or Arthur-3x10^8 and Ford-3141592623;
it doesn't matter too much. What does matter is that Arthur-1 is
not on the Earth that gets destroyed by the Grebulons and thus the
Vogon Captain (who could be VC-1295 for all we know) does not fufill
what I think of as his orders (kill all the Arthurs and all the 
Trillians who escaped from the Earth). One cannot argue that there 
is some sort of conservation of main characters because there are 
obviously two Trillians. There must be a Fenchurch-3 which implies 
that the Earth got destroyed and replaced at least twice by two 
different sets of dolphins which implies that there are at least two 
different sets of Vogons. In an infinite number of universes there 
is an infinite number of the everyone and, in fact, every work of 
fiction is true somewhere, somehow, at least true enough that 
everyone in it believes that everything in the work of fiction is 
happening (Say, for example, that the speed of light cannot be 
exceeded. There is still a universe (an infinite number of them, 
in fact) in which everyone believes (due to random firings of 
neurons (improbability in an infinite universe or an infinite number 
of universes is bunk)) that they go faster than light all the time, 
even if they do not actually exceed the speed of light or extract 
the universe from pieces of fairy cake or whatever. Anyway, I'll 
wrap this up with two conclusions:

1) Arthur-1 and Fenchurch-1 are still around somewhere, hopefully 
   together, as are Trilian-1, Ford-1, Zaphod-1 and Marvin(1-37)-1

2) I like MH better the more times I read it (I'm on my third at the
   moment. It was depressing and funny the first time and now it is
   not so depressing, just as funny, and I appreciate the parallelism
   and plotting more). 

3) It is well worth it to go see Douglas Adams speak. He was here last
   night and he read the bit about the Oracular planet from Mostly
   Harmless (up to and including the old woman and her photocopier),
   the meal of the day bit from Restaurant, the poisonous snake person
   bit from Last Chance to See, the buying condoms in China bit from 
   the same book, and the Battle Robot and Marvin bit from Restaurant.
   And yes, the Battle Robot and Marvin bit is every bit as good as
   everyone has been saying it is. He also (at the request of one of 
   the people in the audience) told the biscuit story which he swears
   really happened to him in Cambridge train station in July of 1976 
   and it's not an urban legend. (Afterwards I went home and watched `
   Larry King's interview with Dave Barry. Happy day!)

  _            "Don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things
 (_ __  o _    than you free with my breakfast cereal." --Zaphod B.
 (_/ (_<_(_ @astro.lsa.umich.edu        (Pecan-flavored ice cream?)