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. 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. 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." 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 1977 – 14 months before ''The Hitchhiker's Guide'' first broadcast "42" in
Fit the Fourth, 29 March 1978. 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." 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. 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:
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. The standard for Tagged Image File Format
TIFF defines in its Image File Header bytes 2 and 3 to denominate a 'version number' 42. In revision 5.0 the specification explained the choice with "This number, 42 (2A in hex), is not to be equated with the current Revision of the TIFF specification. In fact, the TIFF version number (42) has never changed, and probably never will. If it ever does, it means that TIFF has changed in some way so radical that a TIFF reader should give up immediately. The number 42 was chosen for its deep philosophical significance." The later versions have eliminated the lengthy description, but kept the number fixed at 42 anyway. The
random seed chosen to procedurally create the whole universe of the online multi-player computer game
EVE Online was chosen as 42 by its lead game designer in 2002. In the 2001 computer game
Gothic, "42" is a code that deactivates all activated cheats. After typing "42" in a right place, the text "
What was the question?" appears. The
OpenSUSE team decided the next version will be based on
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and named "
Leap 42". The number 42 was chosen as a reference to the answer to life, the universe and everything. The Google 1st generation
Chromecast has the model number H2G2-42 referencing Douglas Adams' book.
Cultural references The
Allen Telescope Array, a radio telescope used by
SETI, has 42 dishes in homage to the Answer. In the American TV show
Lost, 42 is the last of the mysterious numbers
4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42. In an interview with
Lostpedia, producer
David Fury confirmed this was a reference to ''Hitchhiker's''. The British TV show
The Kumars at No. 42 is so named because show creator
Sanjeev Bhaskar is a ''Hitchhiker's'' fan. The band
Coldplay's 2008 album
Viva la Vida includes a song called "
42". When asked by
Q if the song's title was ''Hitchhiker's''-related,
Chris Martin said, "It is and it isn't." The band
Level 42 chose its name in reference to the book. The 2007 episode "
42" of the British
science fiction television series
Doctor Who was named in reference to the Answer. Writer
Chris Chibnall acknowledged that "it's a playful title".
Ken Jennings, defeated along with
Brad Rutter in a
Jeopardy! match against
IBM's
Watson, writes that Watson's
avatar which appeared on-screen for those games showed 42 "threads of thought," shown as colourful lines spinning around Watson's logo, and that the number was chosen in reference to this
meme. The Hitchhiker
knitting pattern, designed by Martina Behm, is a scarf with 42 teeth. In
The Flash, Season 4, Episode 1, Cisco in trying to decipher what Barry is writing explicitly says that what Barry says might solve answer to the Life, the Universe and Everything, which Caitlin suggests is 42. In
The X-Files,
Fox Mulder lives in apartment 42. This has been acknowledged by the show's creator,
Chris Carter, as a reference to
Hitchhikers. The number 47 appears often throughout the
Star Trek franchise. When producer
Rick Berman was asked about the unusual frequency of the number, he stated, "47 is 42, corrected for inflation." In season 2, episode 4 of
A Discovery of Witches, an auction lot bearing drawings of the series' two main leads is numbered 42 and the number's connection to Douglas Adams is recognized in a conversation. == ''Don't Panic'' ==