Character Dossier: The Student Inventor of the Infinite Improbability GeneratorCopy Anchor Link

"Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up the lab after a particularly unsuccessful party found himself reasoning this way:
If, he thought to himself, such a machine is a virtual impossibility, then it must logically be a finite improbability. So all I have to do in order to make one is to work out exactly how improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea ... and turn it on!
He did this, and was rather startled to discover that he had managed to create the long-sought-after golden infinite improbability generator out of thin air.
It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smartass."

— The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Chapter 10

The Student Inventor of the Infinite Improbability Generator was a physics student whose solitary deduction while sweeping up a laboratory after a particularly unsuccessful party revolutionized interstellar travel and led directly to the construction of the Starship Heart of Gold.

The Failure of the Respectable PhysicistsCopy Anchor Link

Prior to the student's breakthrough, respectable physicists had long known how to generate small amounts of finite improbability by hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (such as a nice hot cup of tea)—devices commonly used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess's undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminacy.

However, the respectable physicists resented these party generators (partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties), and they resented even more their perpetual failure to construct a machine that could generate the infinite improbability field needed to flip a spaceship across the mind-paralysing distances between the furthest stars. Eventually, they grumpily announced that such a machine was virtually impossible.

The Lab-Sweeping Deduction & LynchingCopy Anchor Link

1. Virtual Impossibility Equals Finite Improbability: Left behind to sweep up the lab after a particularly unsuccessful party, the student realized that if an infinite improbability machine was a virtual impossibility, it must logically be a finite improbability.
2. Materializing the Golden Generator: Working out the exact figure for how improbable the machine was, he fed that figure into the lab's finite improbability generator, gave it a fresh cup of really hot tea, and turned it on—startling himself by creating the long-sought-after golden Infinite Improbability Generator out of thin air.
3. The Prize for Extreme Cleverness & The Mob: The student was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness, only to be even more startled moments later when he was lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smartass. His golden generator was subsequently developed into a governable form of starship propulsion by the Galactic Government's research team on Damogran.