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The Engine Room of the Heart of Gold is the location of the black, black arts used to move the ship simultaneously through every point in space-time, deposit it wherever you want to go, and do a large number of other very improbable things before breakfast, assuming you breakfast late (as Zaphod Beeblebrox always does).
However, the true nature of the technology powering the Heart of Gold is a closely-guarded secret for three important reasons.
Firstly, the hypermathematics involved is so staggeringly painful that even the Wizard-Poets of Xoburg must undergo surgery before attempting to perform a single radix-free Spelunketeria Transform involved in the Improbability Matrix calculation. Fortunately, a lot of the hard sums are done by the Bambolweeny 57 sub-meson brain (foreground left).
Secondly, the commercial potential of Improbability travel is reckoned to be enormous. Therefore, exploitation rights are jealously protected by any means possible. Many prominent scientists mysteriously disappeared shortly after working on the developmental model of the Drive; subsequently, curiously familiar-looking sales managers appeared at the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation headquarters with odd scars on their crania (or, in one case, on her abdomen).
The third reason, however, is that the side-effects of improbability travel are so hideous and tortuous that the anticipated level of public protest at its use was thought to be unacceptable. In reality, of course, people are generally far lazier: Stellar Unification Vectorizer (SUV) drives, which relied on hyperspatially linking the cores of main sequence suns to the centre of the spacecraft's engine bay, caused such intense microwave radiation that some folk cosmologists on more primitive planets still believe this "background" to be evidence for the "Big Bang" theory. It wasn't until the families of one prominent Galactic Council member were actually cooked, along with their entire planet's population, by the exhaust of a spacecraft eight light years away that SUV engines were banned outright by the Kyoto[1] protocol on universal warming.
The technical detail is as follows:
Nature of Infinite Improbability Travel: The Atomic Vector Plotter produces information on either the position or the momentum of molecules within the source of Brownian motion, here provided by the Washinator 7620 industrial washing machine (left wall, between the HD04 disc units and the TT03 tape transports). This is conventionally filled with hot tea, which the Washinator then keeps hot and agitated; however, Marvin finds it convenient to do miscellaneous laundry during jumps, and the tiny particles of ick dislodged from Zaphod Beeblebrox's RoXoX™[2] provide Brownian motion comparable to that of the suspended milk particles in a really hot cup of tea.
The plotter then feeds the information into the Fourier transformer / Bambolweeny 57 assembly (centre and foreground left, respectively). On a similar basis to that employed in the Total Perspective Vortex and, more recently, the Haldo-Melodicon electric piano, the state of the entire universe is deduced from this random motion; however, whereas the Vortex measures the approximate position of the universe's particles, and the Haldo-Melodicon makes a foul and saccharine cacophony, the Bambolweeny uses the data to deduce the uncertainty, or indeterminacy, of the entire universe. It is then a short step to calculating how easy it is going to be to force certain quantum events and, say, make the hostess's undergarments jump three feet to the left.
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| Advertisement for the original model of Fourier Transformer in the series used in the Heart of Gold |
The problem, of course, is that certain quantities must be conserved. In other words, it is perfectly possible to do impossible things as long as you also do equally impossible things in the opposite direction. Since it's impossible to be sure which direction is the opposite direction when you pass through every point in the universe simultaneously, the effects can be anything between tedious rocks moving tediously to one tedious side and complete universal annihilation.
The curious tendency for the side-effects of Infinite Improbability Travel to manifest themselves in a narratively coherent way have been seen by some as signs of Something Going On, and therefore have been seized upon by Oolon Colluphid as hard evidence of Nothing Going On. Precisely what point this all serves is unclear; the same could be said for the entire preceding explanation. Conclusion of the foregoing.
It should be noted that it is actually completely impossible to fit the major components of the Infinite Improbability Drive into a box smaller than about a metre on a side. Consequently, it was almost inevitable that a micro-Infinite Improbability Drive (foreground, on the Bambolweeny 57's operator console) would turn up mysteriously one day after a particularly bewildering test session on the main Drive. Other side effects of this test included the appearance of a really, really enormous computer which thought two plus two made seven, and nearly killed its creator and his best friend to prove this point, but that's another story[3].
[1] Kyoto, Betelgeuse, is not to be confused with Kyoto, Japan. The whole thing is an unfortunate coincidence, although has been seen by some as evidence of the essentially fractal nature of history, but frankly it's been said before in other places.
[2] RoXoX™ are the sock of choice for any really, really relaxed guy this season. Zaphod Beeblebrox's level of relaxation being halfway between lethargic and clinically dead, he wouldn't be seen in anything else.
[3] To be exact, it's part of The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem, and if you haven't, you really must.
