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--Spoiler alert-- And the answer 42 turned out to be "What do you get if you multiply six by nine" in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not trying to brag but I've crossed hundreds of bridges.
Ah, but how many metaphorical bridges? (but btw. the parent comment was a reference to the book, where someone tried to come up with a fake question, matching the answer)
Why is the answer to "the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" the number 42? An interesting Christian twist might be ... * GIVEN ... * the number of (hu)mankind, 3x for emphasis in some contexts where humans want to stand completely alone, is "666" * the atom for human is "6" * the number most often associated with divinity in the bible is "7" * THEN ... * the product of interaction of the divine…
I thought it's that you have to cross 42 bridges in your life.
But of course we now know it's actually 137 :)
My dad, a nuclear physicist, always had his briefcase locked with the combination 137-731. As a kid I just knew it was "some important physics number". (He never kept anything super secret in there as far as I know; the lock was just to stop it from opening by accident)
It seems a year out to me. The original radio series was broadcast in 1978, so 42 is now 43. --Spoiler alert-- And the answer 42 turned out to be "What do you get if you multiply six by nine" in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
Why is the answer to "the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" the number 42? An interesting Christian twist might be ... * GIVEN ... * the number of (hu)mankind, 3x for emphasis in some contexts where humans want to stand completely alone, is "666" * the atom for human is "6" * the number most often associated with divinity in the bible is "7" * THEN ... * the product of interaction of the divine…
How come there were seven horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Bible? and 12 disciples of Jesus? and ten commandments? It's real confusing. maybe what it means since there's seven horsemen of the Apocalypse and six is the number for the human...7*6=42. Maybe it means the horseman of the apocalypse and the human beings are going to be friends and the humans can get a ride on the back of the cool apocalypse horses.
I like the theory that 42 was chosen because ASCII 42 is *, as in the wildcard character. It matches everything!
> > 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker's_...?
I like the theory that 42 was chosen because ASCII 42 is *, as in the wildcard character. It matches everything!