Hacker News Reader

Comment by OnACoffeeBreak | Hacker News Reader

This is off-topic, but I've always wanted to bring this up with fellow geeks... Integer code of the asterisk ('*') ASCII character is 42, which, is the answer to life, the universe and everything. The asterisk character is used as a wildcard character to indicate anything and everything.

Adams never revealed the origin of 42. [0] So, just because we really don't know, I'd like to think it originates with ASCII table and the asterisk.

0 - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/03/douglas-adams-...

View on HN

He posted (on his own usenet fan group) the following:

"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."

But of course nobody is an entirely reliable narrator, and certainly not the author of The Guide so... Maybe?

(Edit: I see a peer respondent already linked it, but I'll leave this anyway)

Of course, no one wants to believe this. Me neither. I recently turned 42. And, I finally had the guts to start my own business... it's gotta mean something!

Way to go! :)

If I remember rightly Adams played guitar with Pink Floyd to celebrate his 42nd birthday. Beat that!

Congratulations & good luck. I'm sure it will take you to interesting places!

There's also this little bit from an interview:

Q: About three-quarters the way through the Illustrated Hitchhikers Guide there is a strange illustration of 42 multi-coloured balls lined up in columns 6x7. I can only assume this is the famed "42 Puzzle". My question is, how do you play? What's the puzzle?

DNA: The point of the puzzle was this: Everybody was looking for hidden meanings and puzzles and significances in what I had written (like 'is it significant that 6 * 9 is 42 in base 13?'. As if.) So I thought that just for a change I would actually construct a puzzle and see how many people solved. Of course, nobody paid it any attention. I think that's terribly significant.

This is what's so great about art IMO. You can craft a piece with deep personal meaning, or a totally frivolous piece, and it can be perceived in infinitely many ways by others according to their own worldview and life experience. I wish I could know what it feels like to learn a new interpretation of your own work on a regular basis. Beauty, eye, beholder.

It sounds somewhat equally exciting to, and less frustrating than, releasing software and seeing all the ways people break it.

Before Hitchhiker's, he'd interestingly already used that number in a sketch for the Burkiss Way [1], which featured a reference to "42 Logical Positivism Avenue".

[1] https://www.buttercookie.de/The%20Burkiss%20Way/Transcripts/...

That's a good one. My favorite is this one:

- F is the 6th letter of the alphabet.

- I is the 9th letter of the alphabet.

- S is the 19th letter of the alphabet.

- H is the 8th letter of the alphabet.

6 + 9 + 19 + 8 = 42. IOW, the dolphins probably manipulated the experiment so that humans would give them more fish.

Michael Drosnin furiously taking notes

When I was in middle school I was sure I had cracked the meaning behind 42. I sent Douglas Adams a letter telling him how much I appreciated the books and laying out in detail how the alphanumeric values of each major character's name related to 42.

He wrote back an exceedingly kind hand-written postcard informing me that he appreciated my curiosity but that there was, in fact, no deeper meaning to 42 other than it was a nice-sounding number.

> Adams never revealed the origin of 42

I could swear blind I'd heard/read him saying that it was simply a number that could sound amusing, be pronounced rather incredulously, was big enough for the multiplication at the end not working to work, without being too long to repeat in the actors lines or having an existing "meaning" that he was aware of (so 69 was way out because of reasons, as were things like 88 too for having commonly known (in the UK at the time) bingo calls, etc.).

Then again, my ancestors may have previously sworn blind about the giant mutant star goat thing so you might not want to trust the ponderings of anyone of my lineage...

Also off-topic, TIFF files use 42 as a magic number in bytes 2 and 3 of the file header:

"The number 42 was chosen for its deep philosophical significance."

Unlikely to be the source as TIFF was first released 1986 and HHGTTG initial "release" was 1978. Although I'm not sure "the answer" was mentioned in the original radio show.

Right, the TIFF creators were obviously inspired by the Hitchhikers Guide.

Hah, obviously, I misunderstood the intent of your comment, makes much more sense the other way around :)

Just another case of causal inversion.

“Not again!”

I always assumed it was British random dry humor, much like the show "Look Around You" [1] and more specifically their episodes around "maths" the full episode of which I can not find.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J9MRYJz9-4

Why 42: https://groups.google.com/g/alt.fan.douglas-adams/c/595nPukE...

Contrived, but I always liked the idea that a rearrangement of the syllables could be voiced as "tea for two".

> Adams never revealed the origin of 42.

Actually Stephen Fry claims that Douglas Adams told him. But it seems he is taking it to the grave to honor his vow.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker%27...?

I've heard fry say this before but don't believe him

It would be amusing if this was the case, but would he have been familiar with ASCII and wildcards when he wrote it?

It is rather easy to assume that ASCII and wildcards would be common knowledge since they predate the series while being common knowledge today (at least among those who use computers), but was this true when the series was written? ASCII is by no means the only character encoding scheme and asterisks are by no means the only wildcard character.

I remember exactly where I was, about a year ago today, when I realized Deep Thought was an existentialist. B2 Data Structures lab in a building called Fitz. I knew I couldn’t have been the first to realize this, but I couldn’t bear to look it up and see whether or not I’d been preempted.

And it was totally what he meant. The ASCII wildcard-existentialism theory is too consistent with the themes Adams explores through the series to have been an accident.

I fully agree with Musk when he said he regards the Hitchhiker’s Guide as a great work of philosophy, whether or not he was joking. It totally worked for me as I was trying to progress beyond nihilism.

Nice. Seriously, humans are the greatest pattern matchers.

It could very well have been chosen at random, but it's just as likely that he simply picked it up as the go-to "silly arbitrary number" from Lewis Carroll, who used it multiple times. "Rule 42" in the court, "Rule 42 of the Code" when hunting the Snark.

it's the number of harrod's earl grey tea.

https://www.harrods.com/en-us/shopping/harrods-no-42-earl-gr...

No, it isn't, because it was written in 1977, almost before the microcomputer – and until the Mac, Adams hated computers.

It's not a binary joke, either.

However, if you add together the numbers on all the faces of a pair of normal 6-sided dice...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com