42 is the answer to these 5 fundamental questions | Hacker News Reader

42 is the answer to these 5 fundamental questions

bigthink.com

28 pointssohkamyung12 comments

For anyone intrigued as to why Douglas Adams chose 42, it was simply the funniest number to have as that punchline. It needed to be double digits, as all the single digit numbers have cultural significances, it needed to not be prime or anything else interesting, and it needed to not be too "round" like a multiple of 5 or ten. He apparently tried a few, and then as soon as he tried 42 the joke landed perfectly. I love the fact that it's so perfect that he's unintentionally created the cultural significance he wanted to avoid.

A carefully chosen random number.

> Only, what's the point of knowing the answer if, 7.5 million years later, no one can remember what the question was?

I remember it as them not knowing what the question was, not that they couldn't remember what it was. It's a very subtle distinction.

IIRC it was more that they computer had to come up with the properly phrased question before it could answer it. It never shared the full question it answered.

From Wikipedia: "Deep Thought points out that the answer seems meaningless because the beings who instructed it never knew what the question was."

> IIRC it was more that they computer had to come up with the properly phrased question before it could answer it. It never shared the full question it answered.

It was exactly the opposite: the computer was able to come up with the answer, but insufficiently powerful to figure out the question, which is why it had to design an even more powerful computer, disguised as a planet (Earth), to compute the question.

Unfortunately (both for getting the question and for the people living on it), that computer was destroyed just before giving its output.

But it was later replaced.

EDIT: I'm not quite right - Deepthought was never able to identify the question, just the answer. It helped create Earth however. So the parent is correct. :)

Deep Thought needed to know the question to answer it, so it came up with the question. Importantly though, it never shared the question it came up with, just the answer. Earth was created to correct that shortcoming and identify the question for the humans.

Reminds me of a quote in Pi [0]:

“You want to find the number 216 in the world, you will be able to find it everywhere. 216 steps from a mere street corner to your front door. 216 seconds you spend riding on the elevator. When your mind becomes obsessed with anything, you will filter everything else out and find that thing everywhere.”

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_(film)

I might be being cynical, but anything involving anthropic units like km or degrees doesn't feel very fundamental. And, since there are provably no mathematically uninteresting numbers, you can pick any number and find some interesting mathematical facts about it :p

Also there are 42 3x3 square Young tableaux, which seems quite interesting, and maybe more fundamental than some (all?) of the examples.

I once owned an Oldsmobile with a 4-speed tranny, dual exhaust and a 400 ci, big block engine. THE answer is 442! (sorry)

I would really like to purchase the ven diagram in this post on a T-shirt. Just sayin'

By a strange coincidence, my HN karma points today ends with 42. :-)

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