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Forty Two: Perspectives in Literature.
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In case you thought I had the answer, well, I have. It's forty-two. But you knew that.
On my birthday, Friday, September 5th, I will be forty-two years old. Various traditions and sources credit this number as being the answer to life, the universe, and everything.
The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is numeric 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. It takes Deep Thought 7½ million years to compute and check the answer, which turns out to be 42.
Unfortunately, The Ultimate Question itself is unknown, suggesting on an allegorical level that it is more important to ask the right questions than to seek definite answers. Indefinite answers to some questions are better left that way if it is the wrong question.
After teaching Arthur Dent about Deep Thought, Slartibartfast muses:
“ I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.... What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things of course, but I'd far rather be happy than right any day ... [But I am not,] that's where it all falls down, of course. [Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. ISBN 0-330-25864-8.][wikipedia sourced]
[People] have made a game of finding 42s, such as these:
• The angle at which light reflects off of water to create a rainbow is 42 degrees.
• Two physical constants in the universe are the speed of light and the diameter of a proton. It takes light 10 to the minus 42nd power seconds to cross the diameter of a proton.
• A barrel holds 42 gallons.
(It should be noted that all of these 42s are base 10, not base 13.) [http://searchcio-midmarket.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid183_gci211501,00.html#]
In Lewis Carroll's book The Hunting of the Snark, (before Douglas Adams' tome was written) the baker left 42 pieces of luggage on the pier.
42 is also a sphenic number, a Catalan number and is bracketed by twin primes.
42 is the number you get when you add up all the numbers on two six-sided dice. This is showing that life, the universe, and everything is nothing but a big game of craps. [http://www.jayssite.com/stuff/life/life.html]
On my birthday, Friday, September 5th, I will be forty-two years old. Various traditions and sources credit this number as being the answer to life, the universe, and everything.
The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is numeric 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. It takes Deep Thought 7½ million years to compute and check the answer, which turns out to be 42.
Unfortunately, The Ultimate Question itself is unknown, suggesting on an allegorical level that it is more important to ask the right questions than to seek definite answers. Indefinite answers to some questions are better left that way if it is the wrong question.
After teaching Arthur Dent about Deep Thought, Slartibartfast muses:
“ I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.... What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things of course, but I'd far rather be happy than right any day ... [But I am not,] that's where it all falls down, of course. [Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. ISBN 0-330-25864-8.][wikipedia sourced]
[People] have made a game of finding 42s, such as these:
• The angle at which light reflects off of water to create a rainbow is 42 degrees.
• Two physical constants in the universe are the speed of light and the diameter of a proton. It takes light 10 to the minus 42nd power seconds to cross the diameter of a proton.
• A barrel holds 42 gallons.
(It should be noted that all of these 42s are base 10, not base 13.) [http://searchcio-midmarket.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid183_gci211501,00.html#]
In Lewis Carroll's book The Hunting of the Snark, (before Douglas Adams' tome was written) the baker left 42 pieces of luggage on the pier.
42 is also a sphenic number, a Catalan number and is bracketed by twin primes.
42 is the number you get when you add up all the numbers on two six-sided dice. This is showing that life, the universe, and everything is nothing but a big game of craps. [http://www.jayssite.com/stuff/life/life.html]
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