Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything

File:42Puzzle.jpg

The 42 Puzzle, as it appeared in The Illustrated Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything has a numeric solution in Douglas Adams' series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In the story, a "simple answer" to The Ultimate Question is requested from the computer Deep Thought - specially built for this purpose. It takes Deep Thought 7½ million years to compute and check the answer which turns out to be 42. When asked to provide The Ultimate Question, the computer says that it can't, but can help design an even more powerful computer (the Earth) which can. The programmers then embark on a further, ultimately futile, ten million year program to discover The Ultimate Question, hindered by Golgafrinchans after 8 million years, and in the last five minutes by the Vogons.

The author was presented with many readers' theories about The Ultimate Question and The Ultimate Answer in his lifetime, all of which he rebutted with his own somewhat apocryphal explanations.

The search for The Ultimate Answer

According to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a race of vast pan-dimensional hyper-intelligent beings constructed the second greatest computer in all of time and space, Deep Thought, to calculate The Ultimate Answer to The Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Distracted by a demarcation dispute with two philosophers, a "simple answer" is requested. After seven and a half million years of computing cycles, Deep Thought's answer is: forty two.

"I think the problem is that the question was too broadly based..."

"Forty two?!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?"

"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."

In a story filled with much more neo-numerology, Deep Thought is compared with other computers, some have huge numbers in their name, the Milliard Gargantuabrain and the Googleplex Starthinker; earlier the Heart of Gold is said to cost "only" five quilliard Altarian dollars and that ship rescues Ford Prefect and Arthur at improbability level of 2²⁶⁷⁷⁰⁹:1 against. In the third novel, Zaphod Beeblebrox uses a factor of 3^75972XX to get to the Krikkit War Zone.

After teaching Arthur Dent about Deep Thought, Slartibartfast muses:

I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.... What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things of course, but I'd far rather be happy than right any day ... [But I am not,] that's where it all falls down of course.

The search for The Ultimate Question

Deep Thought then insists upon designing a greater computer - incorporating living beings in the "computational matrix" - to compute The Ultimate Question. Earth was so large and mistaken for a planet, and the programmers took on mice-form to supervise. The Ultimate Question - and Earth - was destroyed by the Vogons just five minutes before readout - the Vogons had been hired to destroy the Earth by a consortium of psychiatrists lead by Gag Halfrunt who feared for the loss of their careers when the meaning of life became known.

Lacking a real question, the mice proposed to use "How many roads must a man walk down?" (from Bob Dylan's protest song "Blowin' in the Wind") as The Ultimate Question for the "5D chat show and lecture circuit" (in their dimension). Frankie Mouse admits:

I mean, yes idealism, yes the dignity of pure research, yes the pursuit of truth in all its forms, but there comes a point I'm afraid where you begin to suspect that if there's any real truth it's that the entire multi-dimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs; and if it comes to a choice between spending another ten million years finding that out on the other hand just taking the money and running, then I for one could do with the exercise.

In a 2005 article for the magazine TV Zone, Lance Parkin noted that Majikthise might have accidentally hit upon the answer the day Deep Thought was activated. "I mean what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?". God's phone number is 42, although as Parkin noted, knowing that is no use without the dialling code.

Arthur's Scrabble tiles

File:Scrabble 6x9.jpg

The Ultimate Question?

At the end of the first radio series (and television series, and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe book) Arthur Dent having escaped the Earth's destruction potentially has some of the computational matrix in his brain, attempts to discover The Ultimate Question by extracting it from his brainwave patterns, as abusively suggested by Marvin the Paranoid Android, when a Scrabble-playing caveman spells out FORTY TWO. Arthur pulls random letters from a bag, but only gets the sentence "WHAT DO YOU GET IF YOU MULTIPLY SIX BY NINE?"

"Six by nine. Forty two."

"That's it. That's all there is."

"I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe"

Arthur and Ford are simply forced to accept "What a Wonderful World" the Earth is.

This 'question' is impossible with a standard set of Scrabble, as it has only two Ys. In the TV series and book, the set has been handmade from Arthur's memory; in the radio series Arthur has a "pocket Scrabble set" at Milliways.

The program on the "Earth computer" should have run correctly but the unexpected arrival of the Golgafrinchans on prehistoric Earth caused input errors into the system - computing (because of the garbage in, garbage out rule) the wrong question - the question in Arthur's subconscious being invalid all along.

However, Dent, Fenchurch, and a dying Marvin did see "God's Final Message to His Creation" ("We apologise for the inconvenience").. Just a technical note - but it was Marvin that saw the phrase, everyone else saw what God had meant to say to them. Of course, Marvin sadly died shortly thereafter. Fenchurch had figured out the ultimate question in a small cafe in Rickmansworth, but survived in an alternate universe the Vogons' destruction of Earth without a memory of what it is.

The exclusion philosophy

The exclusion philosophy first appeared in Fit the Seventh of the radio series, on Christmas Eve, 1978:

Narrator: There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

There is a third theory which suggests that both of the first two theories were concocted by a wily editor of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy in order to increase the universal level of uncertainty and paranoia and so boost the sales of the Guide. This last theory is of course the most convincing as The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the only book in the whole of the known universe to have the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on the cover.

The first two theories start the second novel (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe) and are confirmed at the close of the third (Life, the Universe and Everything) where Arthur encounters Prak (played on radio's The Tertiary Phase by the actor who was Arthur Dent in the 1 May to 9 May 1979 stage show"). A Krikkit-robot delivered massive overdose of a truth serum was administered to Prak, who was then sworn to tell "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" which he did unstoppably. Prak confirms that 42 is indeed The Ultimate Answer, and confirms that it is impossible for both The Ultimate Answer and The Ultimate Question to be known about in the same universe, as they will cancel each other out and take the Universe with them, to be replaced by something even more bizarre, (as described in the first theory), and that it may have already happened (as described in the second theory).

The final 42 resolution

At the end of Mostly Harmless, which is the last of the series of novels, there is a final reference as Arthur and Ford are dropped off at Club Beta:

'Just there, number forty two,' shouted Ford Prefect to the taxi-driver. 'Right here!'

The entire Earth (in every version of the Whole Sort of General Mishmash) is destroyed by the Grebulon Leader in a "most terrible catastrophe" soon after this final 42 reference.

Theories promoted by Douglas Adams

In the second paragraph of the whole Hitch Hiker's adventure we are told that The Guide "contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate" and (according to Geoffrey Perkins) Douglas' recollections "may not be absolutely true or accurate, but where they are inaccurate I hope that (to quote the Guide) they are at least 'definitively inaccurate'". Neil Gaiman's book starts with "It's all absolutely devastatingly true - except the bits that are lies".

The Paperback Line Theory

There is a theory that forty-two is actually Adams' tribute to the indefatigable paperback book, and is really the average number of lines on an average page of an average paperback book.

Lewis Carroll and the Number 42

Recently, another link between Adams and the number 42 has been discovered: that one of his favorite writers, Lewis Carroll, himself favored the number 42. See the section entitled "Could the Baker be Carroll Himself?" at The Hunting of the Snark. Apparently, Carroll noted that the character of the Baker owned "forty-two boxes, all carefully packed," included a Rule 42 in the poem (No one shall speak to the Man at the Helm), as well as a Rule 42 in his more famous tale, Alice in Wonderland (All persons more than a mile high to leave the court).

"The Snark" also includes the term "Fit" as part of the name for each section of the poem. The same term "Fit" is used in the naming of the first H2G2 radio series, beginning with Fit the First, broadcast in 1978. This suggests, at least in retrospect, that Adams was aware of Carroll's favoring of the number. Connections between H2G2's Improbability Drive and the subject of "The Snark," which is described by Carroll as "the impossible voyage of an improbable crew to find an inconceivable creature," are also intriguing.

Base 13

Some readers saw that 6₁₃ × 9₁₃ = 42₁₃ (using base 13). Douglas Adams later rejected this, since he had not been aware of this at the time, saying:

I may be a sorry case, but I don't write jokes in base 13.

42₁₃ is read as "four two base thirteen" or "four thirteens and two" not "forty two base thirteen" as the four is not in a "tens" column.

Other theories rejected

Douglas Adams was asked many times during his career why he chose the number forty two. Many theories were proposed, but he rejected them all. On November 3, 1993, he gave an answer on alt.fan.douglas-adams:

The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do.' I typed it out. End of story.

Video Arts theory

Whilst 42 was a number with no hidden meaning, Adams explained in more detail in an interview with Iain Johnstone of BBC Radio 4 (recorded in 1998 though never broadcast) to celebrate the first radio broadcast's 20th anniversary. Having decided it should be a number, he tried to think what an "ordinary number" should be. He ruled out non-integers, then he remembered having worked as a "prop-borrower" for John Cleese on his Video Arts training videos.

Cleese needed a funny number for the punchline to a sketch involving a bank teller (himself) and a customer (Tim Brooke-Taylor). Adams believed that the number that Cleese came up with was 42 and he decided to use it.

Letter from Douglas

A letter was reproduced in Neil Gaiman's "Don't Panic" book:

Q. What was the Question of 'Life, The Universe, and Everything'?

A. The actual question for which Arthur Dent has been seeking has now been revealed to me. It is this:

As soon as I've managed to decipher it - and I'm waiting for someone to send me a primer for the language in which it is written, and it may be some time - I will let you know.

The 1977 Burkiss Way: 42 Logical Positivism Avenue

Adams had also written a sketch for The Burkiss Way called "42 Logical Positivism Avenue", broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 12 January 1977 - 14 months before Hitchhiker's first broadcast "42" in fit the fourth, 29 March 1978.

Radio Interview with Douglas Adams

In a radio interview with the show "Book Club" in January of the year 2000 the question posed by one of the panel members was "Where does the number 42 come from?". The answer given was that Adams was on his way to work one morning, whilst still writing the scene, was thinking about what the actual answer should be. He eventually decided that it should be something that made no sense whatsoever- a number, and a mundane one at that. And that is how he arrived at the number 42, completely at random.

Further reading

Smith, Mol (2007). 42 - The Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything. Maurice Smith. pp. 178 pages. ISBN 978-0-9557-1370-5.

See also

• Meaning of life
• Monty Python's The Meaning of Life
• The Meaning of Liff
• 42 (number)
• 42 Puzzle
• Universal constants, for example:
  • Speed of light
  • Gravitational constant
  • Planck's constant
• Mathematical constants, such as:
  • Pi
  • Golden ratio
  • e

External links

• W3C's Attempt to standardise the meaning of 42
• Google Answers The Question Google's Answer
• 42 - The Answer To Life, The Universe, And Everything By Mol Smith ISBN 978-0-9557137-0-5
• 42 By Jeff Herbert ISBN 978-0-9798312-0-1