Do you remember Mister Bunny Rabbit?. He was a friend of Captain Kangaroo. One day long ago, when I still measured my age in single digits, Mister Bunny Rabbit announced that he owned a book containing the answer to every possible question. I was skeptical about that book, and so was the Captain, who scoffed mightily at the notion. By way of a test, he looked up the question “Where is Mister Green Jeans right now?”. The book’s answer was “In the attic”, which the Captain knew (I forget how) could not possibly be right. While the Captain was still gloating, Mister Green Jeans ambled in and mentioned that he’d just come from the attic.
The Captain was amazed, and so was I. Long into adulthood, I pondered how that book could possibly have known where Mister Green Jeans was. The best answer I ever got was from the journalist Chris Suellentrop, who speculated that it was probably one of those quantum mechanical things where the act of asking the question caused both the book and Mister Green Jeans to settle down from a cloud of possibilities into mutually compatible states. Others—not so very long ago—speculated that perhaps the book was controlled by a satellite operating a surveillance camera.
Nowadays, of course, we can all carry that book in our pockets. I wonder if today’s children would find anything particularly magical about a reference work that has the answers to pretty much everything, and updates them on the fly.
What if you ask the book, “Will the next word printed in this book be ‘No’?”
Bennet, it’s pretty easy for the book to answer that question:
“of course it won’t – stop trying to ask me tricky questions!”
It is interesting to contemplate how we all failed to predict the power of computers back when we were kids. The future was computers that could think and know everything, controlled by geniuses or more frequently controlling all of us. In the more positive visions, we could think a lot less, because the computers could think and work for us. Instead computing is widespread and can fit in your pocket, and it is a complement to education and thinking instead of a substitute. So, we all have access to Mr. Bunny Rabbit’s book, but knowing which answer is the right one and how to interpret it is not obvious without considerable education, knowledge and practice.
Interesting, today instead of trying to get the right answers we now search for the right questions.
NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
Should that book ever meet “The Big Questions,” would that not result in a large explosion that would consume the entire solar system?
Flee!
You can find out where mr green jeans is right now by googling ??? Gee I was wondering where that book was.
More seriously the internet doesn’t always return correct answers because anyone can upload anything to it and this isn’t likely to change any time soon. So I’d imagine a perfect concise answer to everything will still be surprizing in some largish amount of time.
If there were such a book we would have a “truth machine”. I am not sure, but I think such a machine is a contradiction, along the lines of “All Cretans lie”.
When I was a child, my local paper published “Dick Tracy” on the comics page, and I always liked his two-way wrist radio. Little did I imagine that 40 years later we would ALL carry two-way wrist radios in our pockets. And now I can even get a cell phone for my wrist: http://surprisinggift.com/Cell-Phone-Watch-Phones/c108/p1110/W08-Quadband-Touchscreen-Watch-phone-Wrist-Cell-Phone-Camera/product_info.html?language=en#googlebase.
Al: And now, all you need is to see those Dick Tracy comics on that gadget.
or say, ‘gadget, where is mr. greenjeans?’?
Are you referring to this: http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/universal_library.html ?