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' science fiction series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In the story, the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is sought using the supercomputer Deep Thought. The answer given by Deep Thought leads the protagonists on a quest to discover the question which provides this answer.
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Story lines
The Ultimate Answer
According to the Hitchhiker's Guide, researchers from a pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent race of beings, construct Deep Thought, the second greatest computer of all time and space, to calculate the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. After seven and a half million years of pondering the question, Deep Thought provides 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 search for the Ultimate Question
Deep Thought informs the researchers that it will design 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 researchers themselves took the form of mice to run the program. The question was lost five 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.
Lacking a real question, the mice proposed to use "How many roads must a man walk down?" (the first line of Bob Dylan's famous protest song "Blowin' In The Wind") as the question for talk shows, after considering and rejecting various other questions such as, "What's yellow and dangerous?" (a commonplace riddle whose answer, not given by Adams, is variously, "shark-infested custard" or "a banana with a machine gun").
At the end of Mostly Harmless, which is the last of the series of novels, there is a final reference to the number 42. As Arthur and Ford are dropped off at club Beta (owned by Stavro Müller), Ford shouts at the cabby to stop "just there, number forty-two … Right here!" The entire Earth (in all dimensions, not just those in which it was demolished by the Vogons), is destroyed immediately after this final reference.
Arthur's Scrabble tiles
At the end of the first radio series, the television series, and the book The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the second of the five-book 'trilogy,' Arthur Dent — as the last human to have left the Earth before its destruction, 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."
The generation of this "question" is actually impossible with a single, standard set of Scrabble letters (which, interestingly, has 42 vowels). Such a set only has two Ys; but the set shown in the TV series has clearly been handmade from memory, so the question buried within Arthur's brainwaves may have influenced him in creating it. In the original radio version of the story, however, it is made clear that Arthur has been travelling all along with a pocket Scrabble set from Earth.
- "Six by nine. Forty-two."
- "That's it. That's all there is."
Of course, 6 × 9 is 54, not 42. There are several possible interpretations of this. One would be that Arthur indeed discovered the Ultimate Question, which doesn't match the Answer simply because the universe is bizarre and irrational. Arthur Dent accepts this as being the reason in the radio series, when he remarks, "I always said there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe." However, this explanation is contradicted by the book, particularly by the fact that the Earth's computation of the Question had not finished when it was destroyed.
Another explanation is that the program (Earth) would have run correctly if not for the interference of events such as the crash landing of the Golgafrinchans. These important modifications introduced error into the program and caused it to discover the wrong question. This accounts for the irrational nature of the question in Arthur's mind, as he himself is a descendant of the Golgafrinchans. It could in fact be that the question in Arthur's mind is a warped version of the true question.
It is also possible, given Adams' often bleak view of technology (in the late 1970s), that the 6 × 9 = 42 answer is meant to indicate that the Earth project was a flawed design to begin with, one that was always going to produce the wrong question even if the program had been run successfully.
Yet another possibility is that the letters were truly random, and by some extremely improbable coincidence happened to spell out an intelligible English question.
It was later pointed out by readers that 6 × 9 = 42 if the calculations are performed in base 13, not base 10. Douglas Adams has averred that he was not aware of this at the time, and repeatedly dismissed this as an irrelevant concoction, saying that "nobody writes jokes in base 13 [...] I may be a pretty sad person, but I don't make jokes in base 13."
Marvin's Question
Another possibility as to the Ultimate Question is presented in the third book, Life, the Universe and Everything. Often complaining about having a "brain the size of a planet", (this would presumably be necessary to work out the Question, as the Earth was created for this purpose according to the series, and is also, approximately, the size of a planet) and once stating that he can see the Question on Arthur's brainwaves, it is possible the "paranoid android" Marvin may know the Question. If this is true, it is possible that it may be given in the following paragraph, taken from Life, the Universe and Everything where Marvin is speaking to the mattress, Zem:
"...I am at a rough estimate, thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number." [said Marvin]
"Er, five" said the mattress.
"Wrong," said Marvin. "You see?"
Given the situation, and other small clues which an enthusiast should read the book to discover, it is possible that the Ultimate Question is "Think of a number, any number." This would be ironic given that it is in fact not a question.
Impossibility of discovering the Ultimate Question
A joke about the impossibility of understanding the real meaning of the universe first appeared in Fit the Seventh of the radio series, in 1978. There it was stated:
- 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 more bizarrely inexplicable.
- There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
The joke was reprinted in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and re-worked into both Life, the Universe and Everything and The Tertiary Phase, based on the third novel. In the latter novel, 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 (a sort of way to keep the key from the lock). 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.
The mutual exclusion of knowing both the ultimate question and the ultimate answer mimics counter-intuitive principles of quantum mechanics like the Pauli exclusion principle and the uncertainty principle.
Douglas Adams's view
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 2, 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.
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 — knowledgeable C programmers always surround the content of every macro and each instance of a macro argument with parentheses to avoid problems such as this one.
#include <stdio.h>
#define SIX 1 + 5
#define NINE 8 + 1
int main(void)
{
printf( "What do you get if you multiply %d by %d? %d\n", SIX, NINE, SIX * NINE );
return 0;
}
Falsely assuming that the answer is indeed correct, that means that the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything would be 42.
- <math>1 + 5 * 8 + 1 = 42 \,</math>
See also
External links
- Douglas Adams's statement on what forty-two means; see this message.
- W3C's Attempt to standardise the meaning of 42
- Deep Thought A website devoted to listing sightings of 42 all over the world.
- The answer according to Google Calculator Google's response when searched for "the answer to life, the universe and everything".ca:La Resposta a la Pregunta Definitiva sobre la Vida, l'Univers i Tot Plegat
de:42 (Antwort) eo:La respondo pri la vivo, la universo kaj ĉio es:El sentido de la vida, el universo y todo lo demás fi:Vastaus elämään, maailmankaikkeuteen ja kaikkeen muuhun sellaiseen fr:La Grande Question sur la Vie, l'Univers et le Reste he:התשובה לחיים, היקום וכל השאר it:La risposta alla domanda definitiva sulla vita, l'universo e tutto quanto ja:人生、宇宙、すべての答え pl:Wielkie Pytanie o Życie, Wszechświat i całą resztę ro:Viaţa, Universul şi tot Restul ru:Ответ на главный вопрос жизни, вселенной и всего такого