Infinite Improbability Drive

This is the latest way of travelling through space without out the need for all that tedious jumping in and out of hyperspace. The principal of generating finite amounts of improbability are so bloody obvious that I wont go into them here.

Well alright, I'll go into it a bit. The standard approach was to use say, a Babmblweeny 57 Submesion Brain to an Atomic Vector Plotter submerged in a nice hot cup of tea, and this had long been understood. Such gizmos were used to break the ice at parties by making the underwear of various female guests jump away from the unsuspecting (or possibly suspecting) victims body.

Many respectable physicists were not too chuffed with this usage of the technology and attempted to make a more substantial use of it by developing a drive for a spaceship. These were a real bunch on no-hopers (not normally invited to the types of parties mentioned above) and they ultimately failed.
The most important side effects of infinite improbability travel were that hyperspace express routes became largely obsolete, and that the History department of the university of Maximegalon finally gave up trying to figure out the universe, as completely impossible things were increasingly commonplace.

Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

It was left to a student who reasoned that if such a machine is such an impossibility, then it must logically be afinite improbability (obvious isn't it!?). So, the student geezer calculated the probability (or improbability) and fed the answer into an improbability generator (that was just lying around), and made a nice cup of hot tea, and turned it on! (not the tea, the generator). Presto!! The infinite Improbability Drive was discovered!

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Guide itself explains that generating finite levels of improbability using an electronic brain and a strong Brownian motion producer (say, a cup of hot tea) was very well understood, but that scientists lacked the means to create a drive that could produce the infinite improbability field required to allow a ship to travel anywhere instantaneously. It was generally concluded that such a drive was virtually impossible; the only use of improbability drives at the time was to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess's undergarments leap one foot to the left simultaneously, in accordance with the theory of indeterminacy. Many other scientists decided that they wouldn't stand such a thing, partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sorts of parties.

Eventually, a student reasoned that the infinite improbability drive had to be a finite improbability to be a virtual impossibility. After working out exactly how improbable, he fed that value into the finite improbability generator, gave it a really hot cup of tea, and managed to generate the infinite improbability generator out of thin air. After winning the Galactic Institute's prize for extreme cleverness, he was later lynched by other scientists who had been trying to make the generator for years, who finally worked out that what they really couldn't stand was a smart-ass. In describing the invention of the drive, Douglas Adams exemplifies the principle of bootstrapping.

The Heart of Gold was the prototype ship for infinitely improbable travel. The principle is that as its drive reaches infiniteimprobability, the ship passes simultaneously through every point in the universe. It is then possible to decide at which point you actually want to be when improbability levels decrease. An earlier attempt at using the improbability drive, Starship Titanic, was also mentioned. In theory, the infinite improbability drive would make it infinitely improbable that anything would go wrong. It was not successful, however, ending in Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure. This was due to the fact that, in these earlier times when the nature of improbability was less well understood, it wasn't appreciated that any event that is infinitely improbable will, by definition, occur almost immediately.