The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything
Categories: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy | In-jokes | Famous numbers
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 from 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. 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 take 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 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".
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 Mueller), 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, 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."
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 answer even if the program had been run successfully.
It was later pointed out by readers 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 dismissed this idea repeatedly, saying that "nobody writes jokes in base 13 [...] I may be a pretty sad person, but I don't make jokes in base 13."
Impossibility of discovering the Ultimate Question
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.
Douglas Adams's view
On November 2, 1993 Douglas Adams 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 — experienced 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 life, the universe and everything would be 42.
See also
| The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams |
|---|
| Books | Radio series (Parts 1 & 2, Parts 3, 4 & 5) | TV series | Movie | Computer game |
| The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything | Babel fish | Bistromathic drive | Cultural references | Heart of Gold | Infinidim Enterprises | Infinite Improbability Drive | International Phenomenon | Notable phrases | Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster | Point-of-view gun | Somebody Else's Problem field | Sirius Cybernetics Corporation | Starship Titanic | Total Perspective Vortex | Vogon poetry | Wikkit Gate |
| Places | Characters | Races | Miscellanea |
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 Answer to life, the Universe and everything, according to Google.de:42 (Antwort)
fr:La Grande Question sur la Vie, l'Univers et le Reste 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 pl:Wielkie Pytanie o Życie, Wszechświat i całą resztę ru:Ответ на главный вопрос жизни, вселенной и всего такого