Douglas Adams was right – knowledge without understanding is meaningless John Naughton

Fans of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy treasure the bit where a group of hyper-dimensional beings demand that a supercomputer tells them the secret to life, the universe and everything. The machine, which has been constructed specifically for this purpose, takes 7.5m years to compute the answer, which famously comes out as 42. The computer helpfully points out that the answer seems meaningless because the beings who instructed it never knew what the question was. Machine-learning may soon enable us to accurately predict how a protein will fold. But it won't be scientific knowledge It's years since I read Adams's wonderful novel, but an article published in Nature last month brought it vividly to mind.