*42
What is the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything? Well, its 42 of course. Just ask Google calculator:
Some might already be familiar with this reference from the great book series, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy written in 1979 by Douglas Adams. To set the scene, a group of people ask a massive computer, “what is the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”? And after a very long period of time in Deep Thought, it replied 42. This lead to an even greater mystery, which follows the course of scientific study quite nicely when you think about it. It’s common to seek answers, and end up finding more questions. The focus was now on pondering what question could possibly yield 42. Most people were focused on it being some math equation. They thought the ultimate question was really the product of 6 and 7.
People not in the book have also reflected upon this question. There are a ton of theories on the significance of 42.
One theory is that it is linked to the amount of characters in the answer. There are 42 characters in the answer to the Ultimate question, so that is why 42 was produced. While that is a nice observation, I don’t think this theory is well liked due to its simplicity.
answer = 'itstheanswertolifetheuniverseandeverything'
answer.length
=> 42Another theory believes the Sutra of 42 chapters are the inspiration, due to the quantity of chapters in the first Indian Buddhist scripture translated into Chinese. This theory also does not hold. For one, Adams did not hide his “radical atheism”. Second, evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins dedicated his book The God Delusion to Adams. With this knowledge many say the significance of 42 might not be linked to religion.
When looking over theories found online, I even came across a long article that argues how 42 was meant to symbolize Jackie Robinson’s jersey number. Due to Robinson’s achievements of being the first African American to play in Major League Baseball in the modern era, 42 was a symbol of life. While Adams’ had many interests, baseball was not one of them.
It helps narrow down the theories when you have knowledge on the creator of 42. Douglas Adams was a British author who dabbled in all media (radio, books, television, movies, computer games, etc.) It was well known that he was interested in computers for many reasons. Besides the fact he created a computer game, he also wrote and presented a documentary tv series Hyperland which features interviews with Ted Nelson, who co-founded and coined the term hypertext. On a more personal note, he was the first person in Europe to buy a Mac in 1984, and even bought his first word processor in 1982. Adams became a spokesman for Apple, spoke at some technical conferences, and was a keynote speaker at the April 2001 Embedded Systems Conference. Lastly, his biography on his book’s jacket-flap sums it up:
“He [Adams] lives in Islington with a lady barrister and an Apple Macintosh”
The last theory to mention is that 42 refers to its ASCII code. ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is the encoding standard for electronic communication, which was published in 1963. The character represented by ASCII code 42 is the *(asterisk). If you do not possess any programming knowledge, you might make an inference that it points to the ‘star’ which make up the universe. That is also not a bad theory, but when you know a little bit about programming, specifically regular expressions, the meaning of the * goes deeper.
In regular expressions, the * is often referred to as a wildcard character. Not quite the Charlie Day wildcard, but similar to how a wildcard works.
Search patterns are defined in programming using regular expressions. The regex (https://regexr.com/) is used in string searching algorithms. It is common to use an * as a placeholder that can be interpreted as a string of any literal characters or even an empty string. So, what is the value of the *? Well, it can be whatever you want it to be! This ultimately suggests that we are meant to create our own answer and 42 is simply a placeholder for however each individual defines it. Considering Adams’ undeniable interest in computers, this theory is a strong contender.
After comparing these theories and researching a few others, I have to agree with the ASCII code 42. Computers were one of Douglas Adams’ biggest passions, and this theory also draws the most profound conclusion. We all have our own answer to the question, but we first have to define it.
