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The Babel fish is a fictional species of fish in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, that can instantly translate any language to any other language. It is described thusly: A diagram explaining the anatomy of a Babel Fish from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (TV series) This is a screenshot of a copyrighted movie or television program. ...
A diagram explaining the anatomy of a Babel Fish from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (TV series) This is a screenshot of a copyrighted movie or television program. ...
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy,[1] was a BBC television adaptation of Douglas Adamss The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy broadcast in January and February 1981 on BBC Two. ...
Fiction (from the Latin fingere, to form, create) is storytelling of imagined events and stands in contrast to non-fiction, which makes factual claims that can be substantiated with evidence. ...
A giant grouper at the Georgia Aquarium Fish are aquatic vertebrates that are typically cold-blooded; covered with scales, and equipped with two sets of paired fins and several unpaired fins. ...
The cover of the first novel in the Hitchhikers series, from a late 1990s printing. ...
Douglas Noël Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English author, comic radio dramatist, and musician. ...
| “ | The Babel fish is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish. | ” | The Babel fish was a useful plot device for Adams, as it allowed various alien races to communicate while speaking different languages. Adams wrote that the idea that all aliens would speak English was, to him, very strange. For other uses, see Babel (disambiguation). ...
A plot device is a person or an object introduced to a story to affect or advance the plot. ...
The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...
It was revealed in the Quintessential Phase that it also, like dolphins, has the power to effectively teleport itself and its host (in a plural zone) out of fatal danger. The terms Tertiary Phase, Quandary Phase and Quintessential Phase describe the radio adaptations of the books Life, the Universe and Everything, So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish and Mostly Harmless recorded in 2003 and 2004 by Above the Title Productions for BBC Radio 4. ...
This article is about the dolphin mammal. ...
The fish's name refers to the Tower of Babel, a Biblical story, which describes events in Old Testament. People at the time all spoke the same language and built a tower to show their strength and independence of all. This angered God who confused the people and spread them across the earth so that no-such union would exist. Engraving The Confusion of Tongues by Gustave Doré (1865), who based his conception on the Minaret of Samarra According to the narrative in Genesis Chapter 11 of the Bible, the Tower of Babel was a tower constructed to reach the heavens by a united humanity. ...
The Bible (From Greek βιβλια—biblia, meaning books, which in turn is derived from βυβλος—byblos meaning papyrus, from the ancient Phoenician city of Byblos which exported papyrus) is the sacred scripture of Christianity. ...
Note: Judaism commonly uses the term Tanakh. ...
Existence of God
Adams' description of the Babel fish also triggered a digression about the existence of God, since the Babel fish was put forth as a fideist example for the non-existence of a deity: This article does not adequately cite its references or sources. ...
In Christian theology, fideism is any of several belief systems which hold, on various grounds, that reason is irrelevant to religious faith. ...
| “ | "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing." "But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D." The scientific method or process is fundamental to the scientific investigation and acquisition of new knowledge based upon physical evidence. ...
This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...
This article is about evolution in biology. ...
Look up QED in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic." Logic, from Classical Greek λόγος logos (the word), is the study of the principles and criteria of valid inference and demonstration. ...
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and white is black and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing. While most leading theologians believe this argument to be a load of dingo's kidneys, that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book, Well That About Wraps It Up For God. A zebra crossing in Sydney, Australia A zebra crossing in Marine Parade, Singapore A zebra crossing is a type of pedestrian crossing used in many places around the world. ...
| ” | In the feature film The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that scene was omitted and used as a bonus feature on its DVD release. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction comedy film based on the book of the same name by Douglas Adams. ...
Catalyst for War In the continued description by Adams: - Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers between communications, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in existence.
Trivia AltaVista's web translation service, Babel Fish, is named after the Babel Fish in this trilogy. Current AltaVista site logo. ...
// Babel Fish is a web-based application developed by AltaVista (now part of Yahoo!) which machine translates text or web pages from one of several languages into another. ...
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