[w0mbat]

I used to hang with Douglas back in the day and we worked together a bit.

Douglas once told me he got sent a very detailed PhD thesis that described how The Hitchhikers Guide was an elaborate parody of John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" (1678). The main evidence was that "Pilgrim's Progress" is known to be partly inspired by a pamphlet called, "The Plain Man's Path to Heaven", written by, get this, a puritan named Arthur Dent.

Douglas was embarrassed to reply that he'd never read "Pilgrim's Progress", or heard of that puritan, and the Arthur Dent name was a complete coincidence.

Things like that happened to him all the time.

[jraph]

Wow, this is painful. None of the student or the advisors thought about getting in touch with the author during the whole PhD? How come?

I went through a PhD. Should I have worked on an hypothesis that could be tested just by sending a mail, this would have been about the first thing I would have tried to do I think. You know, just to be sure. And I would not have missed the occasion to communicate with Douglas Adams, of course, at least to make this PhD more worth it!

edit: at least, a multi year effort to produce hundreds of pages filled with absurdity was not completely unfamiliar to Douglas, I guess.

[alanbernstein]

You might even call that... infinitely improbable.