42
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So, Why? 42…
By speaking here and there, being interviewed at regular intervals and appearing on TV and radio, Douglas Adams was an upstanding example of everything you could ever wish to see in your writing superstars. Retiring, reclusive, difficult, he was not. But…in twenty three years spent offering comment and insight on much else of import he spoke directly on the origins of forty two only in a particular way. The gist always being that Douglas Adams declined the opportunity to provide the full story behind why forty two was chosen ahead of similarly ‘deadpan’ unfunny numbers. And quite rightly so, magicians fond of telling it like it is about the prestidigitation involved in covertly inserting the ace of spades into the rabbit are thin on the ground nowadays. A collection of Douglas Adams’ explanations and those of two significant others are wodged inside a carrier bag (Caecum A) lodged under the stairs if you should care to go through the evidence. The possibilities can be shaken into eight groups: it was an unfunny sounding number; it was a funny sounding number; it was designed to mean something; it was a random number; he copied it; it meant something to Douglas Adams; it was something else I haven’t thought of; and various combinations of those—except being random with any of the others.
Popular Theory
Popular theories about the meaning of why the Ultimate Answer was forty two have multiplied through time, the list includes; being the age of Elvis Presley when he died, the length of the traditional list of rulers of Tibet, the answer you get when multiplying six by nine in base thirteen, as you do, the number with which the earth is created in Kabbalistic tradition, reversing the digits of Douglas Adams age when he was commissioned to write the first episode, the net angle through which light is reflected and refracted in a rainbow, the code on Douglas Adams’ English library books, copying Lewis Carroll who had liked using the number in his writing, the number of principles of ancient Egyptian Ma’at law, the duration in months of the time the beast may have controlled the earth in some versions of the bible, the number you get by adding up the cipher values of the letters D Adams, for tweeting purposes the number of characters in ‘answer to life the universe and everything’, the number of episodes Douglas Adams had written when the joke was deployed and the number there were still to write, and very sweet—the re-arranged syllables of tea for two. There are more if you need them.
Here Are More
France
A New Zealand Vodka (42 Below)
Mr Simpson buys 42 tubs instead of the 50 on special deal
42 orcs were slain by either Gimli (book) or Legolas (film)
Number of the département of the Loire
42nd day of the year is February 11
Number of first robot to visit Will Smith in I, Robot
A pearl wedding in France
10/10/10 is World 42 Day as 1010102 is 42 in binary
Minimum age of a consul in Rome
German
4+2 = sex
DB (Deutsche Bahn) is a cover for forty two
A Cheops pyramid grave number
Age of Pierce Brosnan in Goldeneye
Bill Clinton is the officially listed 42nd President
God in German is 42 in cipher (g=7 & so on)
Fox Mulder lives in Apartment 42
…and the Pope’s size in red shoes
Australia
Asteroid DA42 was given the official name Douglas Adams
The GNU C library memfrob() performs an XOR with 42 (this one wins the special prize)
42 is a Coldplay track
Strigaskór nr. 42 is an Icelandic band
Episode 42 of Doctor Who is 42 minutes
42 is Buzz Lightyear’s spaceship
An LP of then fictional band Level 42 is in A Clockwork Orange
The favourite number of House MD
Maximum number of studs in Lego games is 42 x 108
42nd issue of Stuff magazine deliberately omitted from sequence
Appears on a shoe in Amelie
Monty Python’s How Not To Be Seen sketch (1970) features government information film No. 42
A Big Clue
Once, even Douglas Adams was excited by the possibility that forty two could really mean something big in terms of Life, the Universe and Everything. The knowledge caused him to experience, apparently, the sort of natural high that finds one playfully grasping the lapels of pals to better inform them you’d told them so and you were right all along and they were all fools to doubt you, etc. The time was in 1996 when Cambridge University astronomers announced with a degree of levity atypical of astronomers from Cambridge University that they might have found the Ultimate Answer because their measurements seemed to show that the Hubble Constant was 42. (Not to be confused with the former international cricket umpire David ‘Connie’ Constant who is 69.)
As you will know, this means that a galaxy one megaparsec distant is shuffling itself further away at forty two kilometres per second which wasn’t necessarily something everyone had realised they needed up their sleeves, but for astronomers is their response when your question is ‘So, just how fast is the universe falling apart?’ Regrettably, if forty two was intended to be the ultimate answer of both cosmic and comic import then no-one texted the universe with a cautious ‘mind how you go now’, as the Hubble Constant is today thought by a consensus of hot astronomers to be up at around 70 and later this year, after his birthday, risks being mistaken for David Constant.
The significance of the above of course—tenders of grassy-knoll conspiracy theories, hobbit-fanciers and the lightly trepanned might care to sit together and chow down on the dilithium crystals here—isn’t that news from Cambridge about the Hubble Constant possibly being forty two and therefore really the Ultimate Answer deeply chuffed Douglas Adams (which is fun to know) but that he didn’t argue with, contradict, or automatically gainsay the proposition with a pile of his own evidence stacked along the lines of ‘…well I just happen to know different, being the oracle and that’.
Sparking Ideas
There was a pause of almost six years between the Innsbruck field Big Bang when Douglas Adams first thought that someone should write The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy and finding that the someone was himself and that now in front of the someone were four pages of blank paper anxious to carry great ideas describing a comedy radio series to the BBC.
One of the first places that Douglas Adams sought his inspiration was the borrowed copy of Ken Welsh’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to Europe that had accompanied him across Europe to Istanbul and back (it wasn’t entirely the greatest of trips—in Istanbul he was ill and returned by train rather than hitching). The Guide to Hitch-hiker’s Guides shows that the original radio series of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy and Ken Welsh’s Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe share a number of ideas and also shows from where some of the ‘sparks from the grindstone’, as Douglas Adams once described his ideas, had originated.
Guide to Hitch-hiker’s Guides
Europe (1971) Galaxy (1978)
The Original The me-too radio shows, records, cassettes, CDs, trilogy, stage shows, radio scripts, comics, audiobooks, TV series, film, DVDs, kindle editions, plus towels
The first sentence explains that the book is designed to show you how to get around Europe for about twenty-five dollars a week—cheaper if you’re tough enough [Original synopsis and Episode One] Ford explains that the purpose of the guide is to help impoverished hitch-hikers see the marvels of the Galaxy for less than thirty Altairian dollars a day
Forty-seven countries are covered, many with a deal of precise information. These are balanced by Albania’s entry that simply says ‘Forget it.’ [Original synopsis and Episode One] The original entry for Earth is ‘Harmless’. Ford gets this enlarged. To ‘Mostly harmless’
[Episode One] And, if you want a lift from a Vogon: ‘Forget It.’
THE ONLY BOOK TO TELL YOU EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW [Episode One] Ford Prefect declares that The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will
tell you everything you want to know.
And so quite a bargain. This is on the back cover near the price of (7/-) 35p. (Britain had converted to decimal currency in February.) (On the radio the narrator was telling you.)
The ‘unfashionable’ reason for Australians and Americans to visit England is to see the Mother Country [Episode Two] Our apparently un-regarded sun is in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the Galaxy
For all their worldly goods and social benefits the bulk of the people are bored—the common complaint of Scandinavian students [Episode Two] Most of the people living on Earth were unhappy for most of the time
What-to-see-in-Oslo recommends the Norwegian Design Centre which offers
‘…all that’s good in Norwegian design’ [Episodes Three & Four] Slartibartfast, who—as we all know—designs coastlines, got an award for Norway
In Lyon? Visit the Museum of Fine Arts to view Gauguin’s Who are we? Whence do we come? Whither are we going? [Episode Four] The narrator orates on the meaning of life: ‘Why are people born?’, ‘Why do they die?’, and ‘Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?’
(Hitching there today to see Polynesians musing the Meaning of Life will elicit a fourth question; ‘Where is it?’, as the masterpiece hangs in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts)
Of particular interest to alert Albanian readers will be the new knowledge that their whole country’s meriting of just a two word entry in Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe (‘ALBANIA—Forget it.’) was to doubly-inspire Douglas Adams. The economical sentence is the same as the advice in The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy on what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon (‘Forget it.’) and terse brevity on a grand scale was of course the original joke about Ford Prefect managing to double the word count of the entry for planet Earth in The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy—Earth leaping from ‘Harmless’ to ‘Mostly harmless’ being where the four-page synopsis ended.
This is not to say that the Vogons are Albanian. Ask the Vogon psyche to stand shoulder to shoulder with the other nationals described in Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe and their mental physiognomy—a love of bureaucracy and loathing of hitch-hikers—matches descriptions of most of the communist states but fits perfectly with the description of the lengthy procedure to be followed to even stand a chance of entering the USSR (this required the date of entry and of exit, and the purpose of visit being stated for every town on the planned journey, with a rider that hitch-hiking is not encouraged). The Vogons were Russian.
The Special Page
Ken Welsh’s opinion about one country seems…different. The first page of the country-by-country section of Hitchhiker’s Guide to Europe introduces the British Isles and Ireland with insights rarely or never seen in any other travel guide for young Americans and Australians (sorry, no Kiwis) thinking of their first trip to England: ‘a lot of her people…can’t afford a train fare’; ‘minds …turned inwards…to fight the ogre of survival against over-population’; ‘gasping cities’, ‘solid wall of bus, lorry, car and train fumes…as healthy as the next cubic mile of poison’; ‘nearly pure carbon monoxide’; ‘dirty, cancerous, black-faced London’. It must have bemused Douglas Adams to read of this London. Ken Welsh explained to me he had been shocked at the difference with his experience living in a beautiful, seaside, Australian small town.
He ascribes young Americans and Antipodeans thinking of visiting England with a very sound reason and a very unfashionable reason. The sound reason being that it was about the easiest place to be able to work. The very unfashionable reason was that England could be seen to be the object of ‘an Oedipus Complex’ being the Motherland to the former colonies. He wrote:
‘…she still offers the solution to the most puzzling question of all: where did our families come from?
‘Plenty of people find the answer a little disappointing.’
Not liking the answer to the most puzzling question of all—might seem familiar to listeners and readers of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy. If this is the point of singularity before the Big Bang of expansion into Douglas Adams’ Ultimate Question and Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything then I am so pleased to be able to tell you that it is on page forty two of Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe.
Thrice 42
To have used forty two three times over in two sketches and Hitch-hikers within three years seems to confirm the explanations Douglas Adams gave for his having chosen forty two (Caecum A). He maintained that it had not been essential for the number to be forty two, being selected simply as an unfunny number—intended for maximum humorous effect in Deep Thought’s deadpan, bathetic, non sequitur punchline.
The popular yearning for forty two to have some deeper significance and not be simply taken at face value as an unfunny number can perhaps be attributed to human nature. There is a part of many of us that favours the mystery of a conspiracy theory over an inconveniently mundane truth. The prevalence of the desire to suspect that ‘there must be more’ would appear to posit a belief that there had once been and still could be, evolutionary advantage for humans to be naturally disbelieving. For example, a majority of 72% of adults in the UK believe that the United States may have, or definitely has, a department that creates false conspiracy theories to discredit genuine conspiracy theories (Appendix X). Almost two in three (64%) believe that the US administration may be or is hiding facts about the 1947 Roswell alien and almost the same proportion (62%) have a similar level of assuredness that the CIA was responsible for killing President Kennedy. Proving negatives—usually the bottom-line for refuting conspiracy theories—is commonly impossible. Once it’s rolling, a conspiracy theory or a there-must-be-more belief defies the second law of thermodynamics being happily self-sustaining without further informational nourishment. Denial is futile.
The proportion of 75% of readers of Douglas Adams who believe that forty two was chosen because it had a meaning (Appendix Y) is similar to the proportion of the population that tends to favour the existence of conspiracy theories. One in four readers of Douglas Adams believe that forty two does not have special meaning and of the reasons prompted the one most likely to be believed, by one in five, was that forty two had been the page number in Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe where there was a most puzzling question with a disappointing answer.
For Douglas Adams there was a deeper and inherently uncomfortable side to an ordinarily innocuous question about families in the plural. An area of his life he spoke of sparingly was the time at the age of five (with a little sister of two) when their parents’ relationship had deteriorated beyond being able to live under one roof—even though there were two young children and divorce was less common than it is nowadays. Although both were to remarry and both had more children, feelings in the future between his mother and father were to remain quite unpleasant. As a result, for nearly all of his life Douglas Adams lived with two families instead of a family. He loved and got on very well with his new siblings but clearly nothing was ever the same. The saddest word I heard Douglas Adams use in the course of my research was his description of having felt like ‘a shuttlecock’ when being ferried, with his sister, between the two families, often by their maternal grandmother.
Two questions remain unanswered: how, and when, Douglas Adams first came to know that forty two was particularly effective as an unfunny number.
Douglas Adams: Seer
Consider the Altair. A computer Jim, but not as we know it. Twenty-four dinky little red lights substitute for a display screen. Sixteen teeny-tiny metal flick switches stand in for a keyboard. The memory could remember the first four lines of this paragraph before reaching a point referred to between computers as ‘sorry, my brain’s full’. There was a manual. The manual assumed you knew about soldering and stuff because you were ankle-deep in chips and cards and wires and little red lights and teeny-tiny switches. You were going to assemble the first personal compute
r from a kit that had just arrived by mail order because you posted a cheque for $439 to Albuquerque, of all places, following the excitement of seeing a picture of a grey box with little red lights and teeny-tiny switches, saying ‘Altair 8800’, that was splashed over the cover of your January 1975 copy of Popular Electronics. It was actually a mock-up—never trust anything you read, and only half of what you see. Augurs of a revolution about to change much of the world that are more immediately recognisable can be imagined.
A Jimi Hendrix fan in Boston saw the magazine and told a friend of the forthcoming revolution. The two were excited, but instead of a cheque they just mailed a letter. Paul Allen (21), the Jimi Hendrix fan, and Bill Gates (19) deduced that if even the smartest of new friends was only capable of chatting in hexadecimal (‘hex’ 42 means 66—the system lacks the potential for humour) even the most loving of geek-computer relationships might become strained and would soon create a yearning for something resembling plain English.
Their letter arrived on the desk of Ed Roberts, inventor of the Altair, offering to show him a program that would let his customers use their new Altairs more easily via a computer language called Basic. A dialogue followed. They had a working program? Yes—actually meaning to say not as such, or at all. Nor did they have an Altair on which to test their programming. On the other hand Ed Roberts was, a) speaking from under a rapidly growing New Mexico snowdrift of Altair 8800 orders and, b) would first have to work on beefing up the size of the Altair’s brain before Paul Allen and Bill Gates’ program could have a chance to work. A mutually convenient date for a demonstration was diarised for March 1975.