| Answer To Life, The Universe, And Everything |
Article Index for Answer |
Website Links For Answer |
Information AboutAnswer To Life, The Universe, And Everything |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT ANSWER TO LIFE, THE UNIVERSE, AND EVERYTHING | |
| numbers in pop culture | |
| 42 | |
| hitchhikers guide to the galaxy | |
| answer to life, the universe, and everything | |
| in-jokes | |
| answer to life, the universe, and everything, the | |
| riddles | |
|
, as it appeared in ''The Illustrated Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy '']] The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything has a numeric solution in Douglas Adams ' series '' The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy ''. In the story, a "simple answer" to The Ultimate Question is requested from the computer Deep Thought - specially built for this purpose - and it takes it 7½ million years to compute and check the answer - 42. Then asked to provide The Ultimate Question, the Computer Says "no" . The Programmers then embark on a further, ultimately futile, ten million year program to discover The Ultimate Question, hindered by Golgafrinchans after 8 million years, and in the last five minutes by the Vogons . The author was presented with many readers' theories about The Ultimate Question and The Ultimate Answer in his lifetime, all of which he rebutted with his own somewhat apocryphal explanations. THE SEARCH FOR THE ULTIMATE ANSWER According to ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'', a race of vast pan-dimensional hyper-intelligent beings constructed the second greatest .
In a story filled with much more neo- uses a factor of 375972XX to get to the Krikkit War Zone.2 After teaching Arthur Dent about Deep Thought, Slartibartfast Muses : ♥ a old-fashioned British thousand million, 109; ♦ 1010 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 (interesting THE SEARCH FOR THE ULTIMATE QUESTION Deep Thought then insists upon designing a greater computer - incorporating living beings in the " Computational Matrix " - to compute The Ultimate Question. Earth was so large and mistaken for a planet, and the programmers took on Mice -form to supervise. The Ultimate Question - and Earth - was destroyed by the Vogons just five minutes before readout - the Vogons had been hired to destroy the Earth by a Consortium of Psychiatrist s lead by Gag Halfrunt who feared for the loss of their careers when the Meaning Of Life became known. Lacking a real question, the mice proposed to use "How many roads must a man walk down?" (from Bob Dylan 's protest song " Blowin' In The Wind ") as The Ultimate Question for the "5D Chat Show and lecture circuit" (in their Dimension ). Frankie Mouse admits: Arthur's Scrabble tiles At the end of the first radio series (and television series, and '' The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe '' book) Arthur Dent having escaped the Earth's destruction potentially has some of the Computational Matrix in his brain, attempts to discover The Ultimate Question by extracting it from his Brainwave patterns, as abusively Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (TV Series) Episode Six suggested by Marvin The Paranoid Android , 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 NINE?"
Arthur and Ford are simply forced to accept " What A Wonderful World " the Earth is. The program on the "Earth computer" should have run correctly but the Middle-class Wodehousian Golgafrinchans replaced the Cavemen and caused input errors into the system - computing (because of the Crap In, Crap Out rule) the wrong question - the question in Arthur's Subconscious being invalid all along. However, Fenchurch did have the correct "God's Final Message to His Creation" message ("We apologise for the inconvenience")6 revealed to her in a small cafe in Rickmansworth . This 'question' is impossible with a standard set of Scrabble, as it has only two Ys. The TV series and book the set has been handmade from Arthur's memory, in the radio series Arthur has a "pocket Scrabble set" at Milliways . The exclusion philosophy The exclusion philosophy first appeared in Fit The Seventh of the radio series, on Christmas Eve , 1978 :
The first two theories start the second Novel ('' The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe '') and are confirmed at the close of the third ('' Life, The Universe And Everything '') where Arthur encounters Prak (played on radio's The Tertiary Phase by The Actor who was Arthur Dent in the 1 May to 9 May 1979 stage show"). A Krikkit -robot delivered massive overdose of a Truth Serum was administered to Prak, who was then sworn to the "the Truth, The Whole Truth And Nothing But The Truth" ( Now Somwhat Ironically ) which he did unstoppably. Prak confirms that 42 is indeed The Ultimate Answer, and confirms that it is impossible for both The Ultimate Answer and The Ultimate Question to be known about in the same universe, and then dies of laughter. ♦ The mutual exclusion of knowing both The Ultimate Question and The Ultimate Answer refers to uncertainty principle and the Pauli Exclusion Principle . The final 42 resolution At the end of '' Mostly Harmless '', which is the last of the series of novels, there is a final reference as Arthur and Ford are dropped off at Club Beta: The entire Earth (in every version of the ] bird, too, had crumpled out of all possibility" thus allowing Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz to put "a little tick in the little box". DOUGLAS ADAMS' You should first note that in the second paragraph of the whole Hitch Hiker's adventure we are told that The Guide "contains much that is Apocryphal , or at least wildly inaccurate" and (according to Geoffrey Perkins ) Douglas' recollections "may not be absolutely true or accurate, but where they are inaccurate I hope that (to quote the ''Guide'') they are at least 'definitively inaccurate'". Neil Gaiman's book starts with "It's all absolutely devastatingly true - except the bits that are lies". Base 13 Some readers saw that 613 × 913 = 4213 (using Base 13 ). Douglas Adams later rejected this as he was not aware of this at the time, saying:8 4213 is, of couse, read as "four two base thirteen" not "forty two base thirteen" as the four is not in a "tens" column. Other theories rejected 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 answer9 on alt.fan.douglas-adams: Video Arts theory Whilst 42 was a number with no hidden meaning, Adams explained in more detail in an interview with Iain Johnstone of BBC Radio 4 (recorded in 1998 though never broadcastThis interview is contained on '' Douglas Adams's Guide To The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy '' (BBC Cassette ISBN 0-563-55236-0) and ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - The Collectors Edition'' (BBC CD ISBN 0-563-47702-4)) 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 number that Cleese came up with was 42 and he decided to use it. Several attempts by fans to find this particular video have been unsuccessful and it is possible it may never have been published or has since been deleted from use). Letter from Douglas A letter was reproduced in Neil Gaiman 's "Don't Panic"10 book: Q. What was the Question of 'Life, The Universe, and Everything'? A. The actual question for which Arthur Dent has been seeking has now been Revealed to me. It is this: As soon as I've managed to Decipher it - and I'm waiting for someone to send me a Primer for the Language in which it is written, and it may be some time - I will let you know. The 1977 Burkiss Way: 42 Logical Positivism Avenue Adams' had also written a sketch for The Burkiss Way called "42 Logical Positivism Avenue", broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 12 January 1977 This is found on the Douglas Adams At The BBC CD set (ISBN 0-563-49404-2) - 14 months before Hitchhiker's first broadcast "42" in fit the fourth, 29 March 1978 .
|
|
|