Two Books To Treasure

There are two books, actually, that I could read over several times, and still come away with something new each time. It’s impossible to choose just one, no matter how hard I try. One is a work of fiction and the other is a non-fiction book, both of which should be mandatory reading at high school level in my humble opinion.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is in fact a series of five books written between 1979 and 1992 which author Douglas Adams satirically refers to as a “trilogy in five parts.” The other four books in this series of comedic science fiction are (1) The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, (2) Life, the Universe and Everything, (3) So Long and Thanks for All the Fish and (4) Mostly Harmless. A sixth novel, And Another Thing by author Eoin Colfer was added to the series in 2009 in an attempt to add to, and continue the story-line using some of Adams’s unpublished work, but I haven’t managed to read it yet.

Such was the success of the science fiction series, that following Adams’s sad and untimely death in 2001 at the age of 49, a collection of his essays, articles and other material was released as The Salmon of Doubt. Meanwhile, the original book spawned a very successful BBC Radio series, a television series, a full feature film, several stage plays and a video game.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (affectionately shortened to THHGTTG) follows the misadventures of Arthur Dent after planet Earth is destroyed by an alien race known as the Vogons. Through his travels we meet other fun characters from the Universe like Ford Prefect, the compiler of the travel guide HHGTTG, Trillian, another human saved before Earth is destroyed, Zaphod Beeblebrox the President of the Galaxy, Deep Thought the supercomputer and Marvin the paranoid and depressed android robot. You will also find out why the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42… or maybe not.

Douglas Adams was both an environmentalist and conservationist, and not surprisingly an atheist. His writing is extremely witty and yet quite profound in many ways. Some of my favorite lines from THHGTTG which have become timeless gems are:

The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by astrophysicist Carl Sagan, famous for the television series Cosmos, was written in 1995 and co-authored by his wife Ann Druyan. They wrote the book to not only explain the concept of the scientific method to complete novices, but to also encourage skepticism and promote critical thinking.

The authors discuss important concepts such as superstition and pseudoscience which is also known as bunk science. The reader is taught how to distinguish reality from fantasy and fiction. In the internet age when so much information is freely available, this book provides some vital tools that should enable the average person to steer clear of the quackery and fraud so prevalent these days. People are so often so easily mislead, and defrauded. It’s become one of the biggest challenges in the modern world.

If you consider how easily people are taken in by common grifters like Donald Trump (most politicians really) and Evangelical hucksters who sell religious hogwash like the prosperity gospel, developing a sound way of thinking which demands a constant level of critical thinking becomes very apparent. To this end Sagan developed what he called The Baloney Detection Kit:

1. Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the facts.
2. Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
3. Arguments from authority carry little weight (in science there are no “authorities”).
4. Spin more than one hypothesis – don’t simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.
5. Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours.
6. Quantify, wherever possible.
7. If there is a chain of argument every link in the chain must work.
8. Occam’s razor – if there are two hypotheses that explain the data equally well choose the simpler.
9. Ask whether the hypothesis can, at least in principle, be falsified (shown to be false by some unambiguous test). In other words, it is testable? Can others duplicate the experiment and get the same result?

Both books feature genres I’m most comfortable with. The wit of Douglas Adams and scientific charm of Sagan are added bonuses. I hope you will give one or both of these books a read at some point.