Do You have a theory of everything?

Question

Here's mine:
Beyond our perception is the base substance of all existence:
(Think of it like a perfectly smooth pond)
This substance is absolute nothing. No motion, no time no energy. But infinitesimally small vibrations within this substance give rise to relativity, because of difference. Difference in location, and time.
(A tiny ripple in the pond)
The frequency of difference in turn gives rise to interaction of differences, which are the fundamental forces of the universe.
(Interference patterns in the ripples)
These frequency differences add up to create everything in the universe, all matter and energy, including us. So we are simply massive chaotic interference patterns in a perfect nothingness.

Feel Good.
I researched your "Electric Universe" theory. Sounds like "intelligent designs'" physics argument to me, and a crock to boot.

Answer 1

42

The Answer to The Ultimate Question Of Life, the Universe and Everything was announced by Douglas Adams in his science fiction series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In the story, the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is sought using the supermegacomputer Deep Thought. Unfortunately, the computer was insufficiently powerful to provide the Ultimate Question when asked after it had produced the Answer (after a very long computation time). The answer given by Deep Thought prompted the protagonists to embark on a quest to discover the Question to which this is the Answer.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
Contents [hide]
1 Story lines
1.1 The Ultimate Answer
1.2 The search for the Ultimate Question
1.3 Arthur's Scrabble tiles
1.4 Marvin's Question
1.5 Impossibility of discovering the Ultimate Question
2 Douglas Adams's view
3 See also
4 External links



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Story lines
[edit]
The Ultimate Answer
According to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, researchers from a pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent race of beings constructed the second greatest computer in all of time and space, Deep Thought, to calculate the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. After seven and a half million years of pondering the question, Deep Thought provides the answer: "forty-two." The reaction?

"Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?"
"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."
[edit]
The search for the Ultimate Question

The Ultimate AnswerDeep Thought informs the researchers that it will design a second and greater computer, incorporating living beings as part of its computational matrix, to tell them what the question is. That computer was called Earth and was so big that it was often mistaken for a planet. The researchers themselves took the apparent form of mice to run the program. The question was lost, five minutes before it was to have been produced, due to the Vogons' demolition of the Earth, supposedly to build a hyperspace bypass. Later in the series, it is revealed that the Vogons had been hired to destroy the Earth by a consortium of philosophers and psychiatrists who feared for the loss of their jobs when the meaning of life became common knowledge.

Lacking a real question, the mice proposed to use "How many roads must a man walk down?" (the first line of Bob Dylan's famous protest song "Blowin' In The Wind") as the question for talk shows, after considering and rejecting various other questions such as, "What's yellow and dangerous?" (a commonplace riddle whose answer, not given by Adams in the Hitchiker's Guide books, is variously, "shark-infested custard" or "a banana with a machine gun").

At the end of Mostly Harmless, which is the last of the series of novels, there is a final reference to the number 42. As Arthur and Ford are dropped off at club Beta (owned by Stavro Müller), Ford shouts at the cabby to stop "just there, number forty-two … Right here!" The entire Earth (in all dimensions, not just those in which it was demolished by the Vogons), is destroyed immediately after this final reference.

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Arthur's Scrabble tiles

The Ultimate Question?At the end of the first radio series, the television series, and the book The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the second of the five-book 'trilogy,' Arthur Dent — as the last human to have left the Earth before its destruction, therefore the portion of the computer matrix most likely to hold the question — attempts to discover the Question by extracting it from his unconscious mind, through pulling Scrabble letters at random out of a sack. The result is the sentence "WHAT DO YOU GET IF YOU MULTIPLY SIX BY NINE."

The generation of this "question" is actually impossible with a single, standard set of Scrabble letters. Such a set only has two Ys; but the set shown in the TV series has clearly been handmade from memory, so the question buried within Arthur's brainwaves may have influenced him in creating it. In the original radio version of the story, however, it is made clear that Arthur has been travelling all along with a pocket Scrabble set from Earth.

"Six by nine. Forty-two."
"That's it. That's all there is."
Of course, 6 × 9 is 54, not 42. There are several possible interpretations of this. One would be that Arthur indeed discovered the Ultimate Question, which doesn't match the Answer simply because the universe is bizarre and irrational. Arthur Dent accepts this as being the reason in the radio series, when he remarks, "I always said there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe." However, this explanation is contradicted by the book, particularly by the fact that the Earth's computation of the Question had not finished when it was destroyed.

Another explanation is that the program (Earth) would have run correctly if not for the interference of events such as the crash landing of the Golgafrinchans. These important modifications introduced error into the program and caused it to discover the wrong question. This accounts for the irrational nature of the question in Arthur's mind, as he himself is a descendant of the Golgafrinchans. It could in fact be that the question in Arthur's mind is a warped version of the true question.

It is also possible, given Adams' often bleak view of technology (in the late 1970s), that the 6 × 9 = 42 answer is meant to indicate that the Earth project was a flawed design to begin with, one that was always going to produce the wrong question even if the program had been run successfully.

It was later pointed out by readers that 6 × 9 = 42 if the calculations are performed in base 13, not base 10. Douglas Adams has averred that he was not aware of this at the time, and repeatedly dismissed this as an irrelevant concoction, saying that "nobody writes jokes in base 13 [...] I may be a pretty sad person, but I don't make jokes in base 13."

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Marvin's Question
Another possibility as to the Ultimate Question is presented in the third book, Life, the Universe and Everything. Often complaining about having a "brain the size of a planet", (this would presumably be necessary to work out the Question, as the Earth was created for this purpose according to the series, and is also, approximately, the size of a planet) and once stating that he can see the Question on Arthur's brainwaves, it is possible the "paranoid android" Marvin may know the Question. If this is true, it is possible that it may be given in the following paragraph, taken from Life, the Universe and Everything where Marvin is speaking to the mattress, Zem (Zem = Earth, in Slovak):

"...I am at a rough estimate, thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number." [said Marvin]

"Er, five" said the mattress.

"Wrong," said Marvin. "You see?"

Given the situation, and other small clues, it is possible that the Ultimate Question is "Think of a number, any number." This would be ironic given that it is in fact not a question.

"Think of a number, any number" is repeated by the Heart of Gold computer near the end of Life, The Universe and Everything immediately after Arthur Dent suggests Prak may know the Ultimate Question and laments that "It's always bothered me that we never found out."

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Impossibility of discovering the Ultimate Question
A joke about the impossibility of understanding the real meaning of the universe first appeared in Fit the Seventh of the radio series, in 1978. There it was stated:

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 more bizarrely inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
The joke was reprinted in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and re-worked into both Life, the Universe and Everything and The Tertiary Phase, based on the third novel. In the latter novel, Arthur encounters a man named Prak, who through a significant overdose of a remarkably effective truth serum has gained the knowledge of all truth. Prak confirms that 42 is indeed the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, but reveals that it is impossible for both the Ultimate Answer and the Ultimate Question to be known about the same universe (a sort of way to keep the key from the lock). He states that if such a thing should come to pass, the universe would disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable. He then speculates that this may have already happened.

The mutual exclusion of knowing both the Ultimate Question and the Ultimate Answer mimics counter-intuitive principles of quantum mechanics like the Pauli exclusion principle and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

Spoilers end here.
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Douglas Adams's view
Douglas Adams was asked many times during his career why he chose the number forty-two. Many theories were proposed, but he rejected them all. On November 2, 1993, he gave an answer on alt.fan.douglas-adams:

The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. End of story.

Answer 2

Giving vibrations or wave lengths as an explanation of origins doesn't begin to refer to the infinite quantity of perfectly interrelated details which make up our universe and our own existence. Why is a dragonfly different than an ant or a honeybee? And how do they affect us if we have derived or evolved from the same "pond?"

Answer 3

The "Electric Universe" do a search for it. It's a much better theory of everything, as far as atoms and such go. Then I'm sure there's someone out there that knows this theory of everything, and how to use it, and takes Life much more seriously than you.

Answer 4

On a very wide scale, everything in the Universe relates to each other..everything.

Answer 5

Gensis 1:1

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."

This kind of wraps up everything. How much simplier can it get?

Answer 6

Smoke another!

Answer 7

No.