h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've just been watching QI XL, for my sins, and there was a little bit about the Gomboc on there. A Gomboc is a little self-righting device - whichever way you start it, it will end up resting on the same point - and it is unique in the world.

I thought this was rather clever and quite good fun, until one of the panel asked its inventor 'so what purpose does this serve?' with a sneering look.

Why is it only science that seems to have the obligation to serve society's needs? Is every work of art, every sculpture and painting, every song and symphony, every film and TV programme, created to serve the greater good rather than a cultural need? Or do they further society in an entirely seperate way to science, which needs to justify every step forward by demonstrating our lives will be richly improved as a result of every morsel we learn?

White-coated boffins messing about with test tubes and contradicting one another with messy, complicated explanations of things that have absolutely no value to anyone anyway. Right?

The purpose of science is discovery: the internet, vulcanized rubber and the electron were all discovered without any practical application in mind.

And there's been a time in the history of everything that works when it didn't work. The gomboc might not be useful for anything now, but who knows what we'll figure out in 10/20 years.

Apparently turtles are part gomboc (or the other way around).

Here's an article on the gomboc with a German video showing it in action and some cute turtles.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/02/the-gomboc-the/

I could certianly do with some gomboc shoes for nights out on the pish... Nothing is totally useless.... all those molecular weights of hormones, and genetic locations of certain human genes I learnt at Uni... well I at least don't have to struggle to think of pretty random yet memorable passwords for the interwebs

Plastic was only invented so that they could make billiard balls without killing elephants.

It was only many years later that we started to mould little figures and hide them in cereal packets.

What's unique about gombocs? Roly-poly toys also have a self-righteing feature.

Yes, but it's due to there being an off-centre weight in them. Gombocs are homogenous and monolithic; the balance comes from the shape rather than the weight distribution

Homogeneous, I thought there could be something like that

Okay, I can't be the only one amused at using the word Homogeneous in relation to a program with Stephen Fry on ?

By the way, shouldn't we (that is, hootoo) write a Guide Entry on discoveries / inventions which started without any practical application (or with practical applications but which were discarded in favour of something more useful afterwards)? A large rebuttal to the "what is it good for" question.



Amusingly, this seems to be the case for maths more often than not. If I remember well, it's explained in Wigner's essay linked to below. That is, more often than not mathematicians come up with fancy stuff, and afterwards physicists observe that these could be useful in medelling their own computations. (As opposed to, physicists get stuck with their problems and ask mathematicians for clever tricks to solve them.)

E. Wigner, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 13, No. I (February 1960), reproduced there:
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html

No, sorry, Jon, you've lost me

That would make an excellent Entry, Toybox!

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You're a good man, Ashers

You're a decent Entry muse aren't you Rich? Me, Alex, how many others have there been?

Talk enough crap about enough subjects, and someone's bound to take it a bit further...

(Thinks : Nah - somebody's already done cricket)