I raise you a quantum teaspoon and a Bose Einstein teapot and a splash of Higgs condensate. And two sugars.

I’m afraid so. I blaming the ageing process.

I vaguely recall there were a couple of guys who wrote books about this.

Ok. So what’s your version of events? I’m afraid the evidence about the screenplay is widely available and the Wikipedia entry clearly states that the book was published after the film. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A...

… the book based on the screenplay. I recall reading the book at age 11 or 12 in an attempt to understand what I’d watched at the cinema. 😳

I don’t think this is correct. Kubrick and Clarke co-wrote the screenplay, based on several Clarke short stories, but specifically one titled The Sentinel. Clarke worked on the screenplay whilst staying at the Chelsea Hotel in NYC, where I had the pleasure (?) of staying in 1983. Clarke then wrote…

It’s been many years since I read Arthur C. Clarke’s novel based on the movie, but I recall that HAL went mad because it was charged to protect the mission at all costs, and the purpose of the mission was known only to those crew members in hibernation.

Nice try.

… and ask yourself: how were these problems eventually resolved?

‘Convincingly’? If you say so. There are lots of unresolved problems: quantum gravity, origin of life, aspects of big bang cosmology… what arguments can I advance that science will eventually resolve these? Call it faith if you wish, but also look back to the ‘hard problems’ of 100 or 200 years ago…

Well, that’s not wrong and, in my view, not mocking either.

This is not a problem, and being critical is not ‘mocking’. If you believe scientists and philosophers should be prevented from critical analysis because they can’t ’come up with something better’ then I’d recommend a couple of books on the history and science and philosophy.

In the olden days when I was an academic researcher, the practice was to list authors alphabetically. Not sure if this is still the norm today. We would discuss changing our names to Aaron A. Aadvark.