The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything

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The answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is a concept taken from Douglas Adams's comic science fiction series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Story lines

The answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, given by the supercomputer Deep Thought to a group of mice, is "forty-two". According to the Guide, mice are 3-dimensional profiles of a pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent race of beings. They built Deep Thought, the second greatest computer of all time and space, to tell them the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything. After seven and a half million years the computer divulges the answer: forty-two.

"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."

The computer informs the researchers that it will design for them a second and greater computer, incorporating living beings as part of its computational matrix, to tell them what the question is. That computer was called Earth and was so big that it was often mistaken for a planet. The question was lost minutes before it was due to be produced, due to the Vogons' demolition of the Earth, supposedly to build a hyperspace bypass. (Later in the series, it is revealed that the Vogons had been hired to destroy the Earth by a consortium of philosophers and psychiatrists who feared for the loss of their jobs when the meaning of life became common knowledge.)

Already booked for a round of talk-show appearances to reveal the Question, the mice become desperate to discover it. During a meeting with Arthur Dent and his companions on the planet Magrathea, Frankie and Benjy mouse reveal a plan to extract the ultimate question from Arthur's brain. Since this involves removing and dicing his brain, Arthur is unwilling to go along with the plan. He manages to escape from them unscathed.

Lacking a real answer, the mice proposed to use "How many roads must a man walk down?" (the first line of Bob Dylan's famous civil rights song Blowin' in the Wind) as the question for talk shows, after considering and rejecting the question, "What's yellow and dangerous?"—actually a riddle whose answer, not given by Adams, is "Shark-infested custard". However, this may also refer to the Vogon Constructor Fleet that demolished Earth, in that they were yellow and most certainly dangerous.

At the end of the book The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (volume 2 of the Hitchhiker's trilogy), Arthur Dent (as the last human to have left the Earth before its destruction, and therefore the portion of the computer matrix most likely to hold the question) attempts to discover the Question by extracting it from his unconscious mind, through pulling Scrabble letters at random out of a sack. The result is 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."

Since 6 × 9 = 54, this being the question would imply that the universe is bizarre and irrational; on the other hand, there is no proof that this was the actual question. After all, Arthur Dent comprised only a minuscule fragment of the vast and complex computer matrix that was the Earth, and besides, it was stated that the computer's run had not finished when it was destroyed. In addition, Arthur and Ford realized that the original ape-like inhabitants of Earth were displaced by the Golgafrinchans, which could account for the irrational nature of the question in Arthur's mind (as he himself is a descendant of the Golgafrinchans).

However, it was later pointed out that 6 × 9 = 42 if the calculations are performed in base 13, not base 10. Douglas Adams was not aware of this at the time, and has since been quoted as saying that "nobody writes jokes in base 13." and also "I may be a pretty sad person, but I don't make jokes in base 13." (Note, however, that the Scrabble board Arthur used had thirteen squares to a side, whereas an actual Scrabble board has fifteen. Furthermore, Arthur's board had four Y tiles to actual Scrabble's two.)

In the original radio series, this scene occurs at the end of the first series (Fit the Sixth). On discovering the question, Arthur Dent remarks "I always said there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe.".

Alternately, some have suggested that the question may be, "Pick a number, any number." Although this is not exactly a question, Marvin the Paranoid Android asks Zem the mattress in one of the books to pick any number, Zem says a number, and Marvin replies "Wrong. See?" Since he often complains that his brain is "the size of a planet," it is somewhat feasible that he could have discovered what Earth was supposed to find out. Also, Eddie the shipboard computer in one part of the books mentions, "Pick a number, guys!" but is ignored by the human inhabitants of the Heart of Gold.

At the end of Life, the Universe and Everything, the third book in the series, Arthur encounters a man named Prak, who through a significant overdose of a remarkably effective truth serum has gained the knowledge of all truth. Prak confirms that 42 is indeed the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything, but reveals that it is impossible for both the ultimate answer and the ultimate question to be known about the same universe. He states that if such a thing should come to pass, the universe would disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable. He then speculates that this may have already happened.

Later, in So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish, the fourth book in the series, Arthur wonders if the ultimate answer might be the sudden startling revelation which Fenchurch had shortly before the demolition of the Earth. This theory turns out to be false; Fenchurch instead discovered God's Final Message To His Creation, the location of which was revealed to Arthur by Prak at the end of the previous book.

Miscellany

• "42" is often used in a similar manner to a metasyntactic variable; 42 is often used in testing programs as a common initializer for integer variables.

• Google has a calculator function in its search engine, which knows the answer to life the universe and everything.

• MSN Search also calculates this query correctly in a similar fashion.

• If you assign numbers 1 - 26 consecutively to the letters of the alphabet and then add the letters found in D. Adams name you will get 42 i.e.:

D.   A    D    A    M    S
4  + 1  + 4  + 1 + 13 + 19  =  42

• Another possible explanation for the answer of 42 is that in the phrase "answer to life the universe and everything" there are exactly 42 characters including spaces. Also, the question and answer "What do you get if you multiply six by nine? Forty-two" contains 42 letters (excluding the hyphen and question mark).

• Additionally, 42 is 101010 in binary and the * as an ASCII character. In pattern-matching * is often used as a "wildcard" symbol that matches any string.

Computer programmers' joke

There is a joke amongst computer programmers that Deep Thought may have had some order of operations issues. The following code in the C programming language defines the macros SIX as "1 + 5" and NINE as "8 + 1", and then performs the computation "SIX * NINE". It returns the answer "42", because "SIX * NINE" is expanded by the computer to "1 + 5 * 8 + 1", and the multiplication takes precedence over the additions. (This occurs because the macro expansion is textual, not logical.)

#include <stdio.h>

#define SIX    1 + 5
#define NINE   8 + 1

int main(void)
{
    printf( "What you get if you multiply six by nine: %d\n", SIX * NINE );
    return 0;
}

See also

• Meaning of life

External links

• Douglas Adams's statement on what forty-two means; see this message.
• Google calculator's calculation of "Answer To Life The Universe And Everything".
• W3C's Attempt to standardise the meaning of 42
• Deep Thought A website devoted to listing sightings of 42 all over the world.

de:42 (Antwort) he:התשובה לחיים, היקום וכל השאר it:La vita, l'universo e tutto quanto ja:人生、宇宙、すべての答え