The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything

The Answer to The Ultimate Question Of Life, the Universe and Everything was announced by Douglas Adams in his 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 supermegacomputer Deep Thought, the computer was insufficiently powerful to provide the Ultimate Question when asked after it had produced the Answer (after a very long computation time - 7.5 million years). The answer given by Deep Thought prompted the protagonists to embark on a quest to discover the Question to which this is the Answer.

Story lines

The Ultimate Answer

According to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, researchers from a pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent race of beings constructed the second greatest computer in all of time and space, Deep Thought, 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." The reaction:

"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 apparent form of mice to run the program. The question was lost, five minutes before it was to have been 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 in the Hitchiker's Guide books, 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, which could lead to the Ultimate Question being, "Where does it all end?"

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. 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.

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." Marvin

"Er, five" said the mattress.

"Wrong," said Marvin. "You see?"

Given the situation, and other small clues, 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.

"Think of a number, any number" is repeated by the Heart of Gold computer near the end of Life, The Universe and Everything immediately after Arthur Dent suggests Prak may know the Ultimate Question and laments that "It's always bothered me that we never found out."

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 Heisenberg 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 3, 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.

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".

Famous numbers | Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy | In-jokes | Riddles

42 (Antwort) | La Resposta a la Pregunta Definitiva sobre la Vida, l'Univers i Tot Plegat | 42 (Antwort) | La respondo pri la vivo, la universo kaj ĉio | El sentido de la vida, el universo y todo lo demás | Vastaus elämään, maailmankaikkeuteen ja kaikkeen muuhun sellaiseen | La Grande Question sur la Vie, l'Univers et le Reste | התשובה לחיים, היקום וכל השאר | La risposta alla domanda definitiva sulla vita, l'universo e tutto quanto | 人生、宇宙、すべての答え | Het antwoord op het Leven, het Universum, en Alles | Wielkie Pytanie o Życie, Wszechświat i całą resztę | Viaţa, Universul şi tot Restul | Ответ на главный вопрос жизни, вселенной и всего такого

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