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Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything

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

According to the Hitchhiker's Guide, researchers taking the form of mice, which are actually 3-dimensional profiles of a pan-dimensional, hyptttttttttttttter-intelligent race of beings, construct Deep Thought, the second greatest computer of all time and space, to calculate the answer to the Ultimate Question. 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."

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 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 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". However, this may also refer to the Vogon Constructor Fleet that demolished Earth, in that they were yellow and most certainly dangerous.

In one of the books, Marvin mentions that he can read the Question in Arthur's brainwaves.

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).

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!" when Arthur wonders aloud what the Question is, 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.

The series ends with the destruction of Arthur and all possible Earths by the Guide. In the final pages of Mostly Harmless Arthur enteres Stavros Mueller's club Beta and all of the twisting storylines come to a very final conclusion. The street number of the club is #42; this leads to the possibility that the Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is: "Where does it all End?"

The joke lives on after Adams' death, and has shown up in everything from Joe Bob Goes Back to the Drive In (Where Joe Bob Briggs gets it wrong and thinks the meaning of life and such is 43) to Adult Swim.

Miscellany

  • If all of the numbers on a die are added up (1+2+3+4+5+6), the answer is 21. If the numbers on two dice are added the result would be 42, so 42 = 2 dice. Thus, maybe the answer is 2 dice.
  • And we all know that 2 dice is a pair of dice, so 42 is paradise
  • "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.
  • If one assigns numbers 1 - 26 consecutively to the letters of the alphabet and then add the letters found in D. Adams name, the result will be 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.
  • 42 is also the code name of the Allied project to deceive the Nazi's about the impending landing of Allied Troops at Normandy, France, in World War II.

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;
}

Assuming that this is indeed correct, that means that the meaning of life, the universe and everything would be 42.


Another way to evaluate the answer is: 

/*
 *     The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
 *     The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything
 *     by Otávio Corrêa Cordeiro
 *     echo -e "otavioarrobageek42pontoorg" | sed 's/arroba/@/g;s/ponto/./g'
 */

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <math.h>

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

int whatDoYouGetWhenYouMultiplySixByNine(void){
    return SIX*NINE;
}

float deep_thought(int _iter){
    float _answer = 0.0;
    if(_iter >= 1){
        _answer = sqrt((whatDoYouGetWhenYouMultiplySixByNine()-1)
                  * whatDoYouGetWhenYouMultiplySixByNine()
                  + deep_thought(--_iter));
    }
    return _answer;
}

int main(int argc, char **argv){
    if (argc != 2){
        printf("Try %s <number of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional creatures>\n", argv[0]);
    } else {
        printf("Deep Thought said: %f\n", deep_thought(atoi(argv[1])));
    }
    return 0;
}

See also

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