As readers of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe will remember, the Total Perspective Vortex was invented by Trin Tragula as a response to his wife's constant plea with him to "have some sense of proportion" when he'd much rather be staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake. To quote from Douglas Adams' work:

The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.

To explain - since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history - from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

When Trin Tragula's wife was plugged into the Total Perspective Vortex, she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it and the shock completely annihilated her brain.

Obviously, we don't want that happening all over the place.

What we've done instead is create the Partial Perspective Vortex, which follows the same principles but allows users to experience some of the same feelings of inadequacy without all that messy brain annihilating.

So if you're feeling puffed-up and smug, take a quick trip into the vortex. That'll soon cut you down to size.