The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a comic science fiction series created by Douglas Adams that has become popular among fans of the genre and members of the scientific community. Phrases from it are widely recognised and often used in reference to, but outside the context of, the source material. Many writers on popular science, such as Fred Alan Wolf, Paul Davies, and Michio Kaku, have used quotations in their books to illustrate facts about cosmology or philosophy.
The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42
In the radio series and the first novel, a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything from the supercomputer Deep Thought, specially built for this purpose. It takes Deep Thought million years to compute and check the answer, which turns out to be 42. Deep Thought points out that the answer seems meaningless because the beings who instructed it never knew what the question was.
When asked to produce the Ultimate Question, Deep Thought says that it cannot; however, it can help to design an even more powerful computer that can. This new computer will incorporate living beings into the "computational matrix" and will run for ten million years. The computer is revealed as being the planet Earth, with its pan-dimensional creators assuming the form of white lab mice to observe its running. The process is hindered after eight million years by the unexpected arrival on Earth of the Golgafrinchans, and is then ruined completely, five minutes prior to completion, when the Earth is destroyed by the Vogons to supposedly make way for a new hyperspace bypass. In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, this reason is revealed to have been a ruse: the Vogons had been hired to destroy the Earth by a consortium of psychiatrists, led by Gag Halfrunt, who feared for the loss of their careers when the Ultimate Question became known.
Lacking a real question, the mice (pan-dimensional beings) decide not to go through the whole process again and instead settle for the out-of-thin-air suggestion "How many roads must a man walk down?", a lyric from Bob Dylan's song "Blowin' in the Wind".
At the end of the radio series, the television series and , Arthur Dent, having escaped the Earth's destruction, potentially has some of the computational matrix in his brain. He attempts to discover The Ultimate Question by extracting it from his brainwave patterns, as abusively suggested by Ford Prefect, 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 ?"
Six times nine is actually fifty-four; the answer is deliberately wrong for that question because the question was miscomputed. 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 the wrong question (because of the garbage in, garbage out rule). Therefore, the question in Arthur's subconscious was invalid all along.
Quoting Fit the Seventh of the radio series, on Christmas Eve, 1978:
Some readers who were trying to find a deeper meaning in the passage soon noticed a certain veracity when using base-13; 610 × 910 = 5410, which can be expressed as 4213 (i.e. the decimal expression 54 is encoded as 42 in base-13). The author claimed that it was a mere coincidence.
In Life, the Universe and Everything, a character named "Prak", who "knows all that is true," confirms that 42 is indeed The Answer, and that it is impossible for both The Answer and The Question to be known 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). Though the question is never found, 42 is the table number at which Arthur and his friends sit when they arrive at Milliways at the end of the radio series. Likewise, Mostly Harmless ends when Arthur stops at a street address identified by his cry of, "There, number 42!" and enters the club Beta, owned by Stavro Mueller (Stavromula Beta). Shortly after, the Earth is destroyed in all existing incarnations.
Reasoning
Douglas Adams was frequently asked why he chose the number 42. Many theories were proposed, including that 42 is 101010 in base 2, that light refracts through a water surface by 42 degrees to create a rainbow, or that light requires 10−42 seconds to cross the diameter of a proton. Adams rejected them all. On 3 November 1993, he gave this answer on alt.fan.douglas-adams:
Adams described his choice as "a completely ordinary number, a number not just divisible by two but also six and seven. In fact it's the sort of number that you could without any fear introduce to your parents."
While 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)This interview is contained on Douglas Adams's Guide to The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (BBC Cassette ) and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy – The Collectors Edition (BBC CD ) 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.
Adams had also written a sketch for The Burkiss Way called "42 Logical Positivism Avenue", broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 12 January 1977This is found on the Douglas Adams at the BBC CD set () – 14 months before The Hitchhiker's Guide first broadcast "42" in Fit the Fourth, 29 March 1978.
In January 2000, in response to a panellist's "Where does the number 42 come from?" on the radio show Book Club, Adams explained that he was "on his way to work one morning, whilst still writing the scene, and 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."
Stephen Fry, a friend of Adams, claims that Adams told him "exactly why 42", and that the reason is "fascinating, extraordinary and, when you think hard about it, completely obvious." However, Fry says that he has vowed not to tell anyone the secret, and that it must go with him to the grave. In an interview at the Sydney Opera House in 2010, two minutes before the end of the show, Fry appears to be ready to reveal the answer, but remains inaudible due to an apparent failure of the microphone. John Lloyd, Adams' collaborator on The Meaning of Liff and two Hitchhiker's fits, said that Adams has called 42 "the funniest of the two-digit numbers."John Lloyd speaking at the 30th Anniversary Hitchhiker's recording at Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture on Wednesday 12 March 2008 at The Royal Geographical Society.
The number 42 appears frequently in the work of Lewis Carroll, and some critics have suggested that this was an influence. They note, in particular, that Alice's attempt at her times tables (chapter two of the 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) breaks down at 4 × 13 answered in base 42, which virtually reverses the failure of 'the Question' ("What do you get if you multiply six by nine?"), in that the latter would equal "42" if calculated in base 13. They find further evidence of Carroll's influence in the fact that Adams entitled the episodes of the original radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "fits", the word Carroll used to name the chapters of The Hunting of the Snark.
There is the persistent tale that 42 is Adams' tribute to the indefatigable paperback book, and is the average number of lines on an average page of an average paperback. Another common guess is that 42 refers to the number of laws in cricket, a recurring theme of the books. Yet another possible reason relates to Adam's background in the ASCII character encoding, where the number 42 can be represented by an asterisk (*). The asterisk, in turn, essentially represents "input whatever the user would like". This leaves the symbolic meaning that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is anything the user would like it to be.
42 Puzzle
The 42 Puzzle is a game devised by Douglas Adams in 1994 for the United States series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books. The puzzle is an illustration consisting of 42 multi-coloured balls, in 6 rows and 7 columns. Douglas Adams has said,
In the puzzle the question is unknown, but the answer is already known to be 42. This is similar to the book where the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" is known but not the question. The puzzle first appeared in The Illustrated Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It was later incorporated into the covers of all five reprinted "Hitchhiker's" novels in the United States.
Adams has described the puzzle as depicting the number 42 in ten different ways. Six possible questions are:
Question Explanation of answer How many spheres are in the diagram? 6 rows × 7 columns What position in the grid does the Earth occupy? 42nd in both row- and column-major order What does the barcode on one of the spheres encode? The number 42 as an Interleaved 2 of 5 barcode Considering red-hued spheres (red, purple, orange, black) as a '1' and those without as a '0', what number does each line represent in decimal form? In binary, each line reads '0101010', or '42' in decimal form (Figure 2) What number do the blue-tinted spheres (blue, green, purple, black) spell out? 42, similar to a colour blindness test (Figure 3) What number is represented by Roman numerals spelled out by the yellow-tinted spheres (yellow, orange, green, black) in the first three rows? XLII = 42 (Figure 4)
On the Internet and in software The number 42 and its associated phrase, "Life, the universe, and everything", have attained cult status on the Internet. "Life, the universe, and everything" is a common name for the off-topic section of an Internet forum, and the phrase is invoked in similar ways to mean "anything at all". Many chatbots, when asked about the meaning of life, will answer "42". Several online calculators are also programmed with the Question. Google Calculator will give the result to "the answer to life the universe and everything" as 42, as will Wolfram's Computational Knowledge Engine and DuckDuckGo. In the online community Second Life, there is a section on a sim called "42nd Life". It is devoted to this concept in the book series, and several attempts at recreating Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, were made.
In OpenOffice.org software (prior to version 3.4) if "=ANTWORT("Das Leben, das Universum und der ganze Rest") (German for =ANSWER("life, the universe and everything")) is typed into any cell of a spreadsheet, the result is 42.
ISO/IEC 14519-2001/ IEEE Std 1003.5-1999, IEEE Standard for Information Technology – POSIX(R) Ada Language Interfaces – Part 1: Binding for System Application Program Interface (API) , uses the number 42 as the required return value from a process that terminates due to an unhandled exception. The Rationale says "the choice of the value 42 is arbitrary" and cites the Adams book as the source of the value.