Thread: The infinite improbablity drive

So just how plausible is this concept?
If you went ahead and actually thought about how the Heart of Gold spaceship uses the infinite improbability drive to teleport itself to any no. of lightyears away, will we even arrive at a hypothetically probable theory?

The ship uses Heisenberg's uncertainty principle which states that one cannot predict the position or the momentum of a particle with certainty at the same time. So once you calculate the desired improbability factor of the place you wish to visit, the ship passes through all the possible positions within that improbability and teleports you!

Okay, perhaps my description is a bit mangled, anyone else is welcome to make it sound simpler. But IS this even mildly a feasible issue of hypothetical discussion, (maybe perhaps in the next 7 and a half million years)?

will we even arrive at a hypothetically probable theory?

No, I think not. How would you manipulate the probability of a system like your spaceship to be in a certain place at a certain time ? There is no conceivable way, not even theoretically.

What is an infinite improbability drive?

Can someone describe it .. actually I want to understand.

Originally Posted by Solarpowe124

Can someone describe it .. actually I want to understand.

It's a hypothetical technology from the book "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy". Basically it is based on an application of quantum mechanics to macroscopic objects - in quantum mechanics objects do not have a clearly defined place and time, but rather a probability to be found at a certain place and time. Technically one could extend this to macroscopic objects like spaceships also; normally the place a ship is located is well defined, but there is an exceedingly small chance of it being far away at some other distant location instead. However, for a big object like a spaceship that probability is so small as to be practically zero, or, in other words, almost infinitely improbable. Hence the name.

Also refer here :

Technology in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia