42

by Peter Gill

  Many things are taught at Harvard University but 2nd year student Bill Gates was self-taught in the skills needed to use the big university computer for personal business purposes. By instructing its considerably-sized brain to become, for a few moments, a baby Altair brain they were able to test their program so that, hopefully, the demonstration in Albuquerque would work. The story then goes that when the big day arrived and Paul Allen flew to Albuquerque with a precious roll of punched paper bearing the program he lacked the cash to pay for his hotel room and was subbed by his potential client. The story further goes that the demonstration ran perfectly and that the first test of Altair Basic was some simple arithmetic:

  2+2=?

  4

  Lives then followed different arcs. Paul Allen and Bill Gates formed Microsoft and became two of the richest billionaires* in the world. Ed Roberts the talented engineer whose ideas and Altair design were very quickly copied by many others within a couple of years had sold the company and aged forty returned to being the medical student he had first planned on becoming twenty years earlier. When he qualified he became a country doctor in Georgia. He died there in 2010. Bill Gates had travelled to see him when he had become unwell.

  Finding 2+2 equalled 4 in Albuquerque was one of the most important moments in modern history. We had a cheap computer. We had a program. We could produce data. We were on our way somewhere but no-one saw that within their lifetimes the money then to be made from the picks (a useable Altair was $1000) and shovels (Altair Basic was $75) could ever be challenged by the data which just didn’t look like gold (4 being worth $0). Ed Roberts sold the Altair business in 1977 for two million dollars, Micro-soft was growing fast by selling programs to the Altair’s competition, and two boys had turned five years old. Their names were Larry Page and Sergey Brin and the two, as you probably know, were soon to found the phenomenon of data made into gold known as Google.

  The Enid

  Where could we be without digression? The British children’s author, Enid Blyton, operating at the top of her game in 1943 was the first person to have thought of Google and after a profitable morning had pencilled in most of the afternoon for resolving the Riemann hypothesis, buttoning down the more nebulous areas of M-theory, fettling the Lampard-Gerrard paradox, and finding a Higgs’ boson or three before making a nice cold tongue and beetroot sandwich when in a moment of loss to science of dimensions unmeasurable her publisher called to say the spread-betting on next year’s Man Booker prize was moving towards the winning novel being about the thraldom of four children by a dæmon hound they knew as Timmy and could you possibly run something up if the weird sciency book went to one side for a couple of ticks, Enid?

  The End

  Improbable as it sounds, until 1982 with regard to all things computers Douglas Adams described himself as having been a ‘technophobe’. The improbability is compounded by his having achieved the unlikely feat of including references to both the Altair and Google together in 1977 in the first radio series of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy. Google wasn’t registered as a word for a further twenty or more years.

  The Altair reference is made in the guide’s proclamation of containing helpful advice on seeing the universe for less than thirty Altairian dollars a day. This reference was to both the new breed of micro computers and the star from which the computer’s name had been taken. The Google link comes with Douglas Adams being first to use the word Googleplex. This is the name of Google’s headquarters at Mountain View, San Francisco: dial 94043 into Google Earth and you can look down on Building 42 where the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, has chosen to locate his office.

  In The Original Radio Scripts the word googleplex is italicised, having been edited out to fit the airtime but the mention of the Googleplex Starthinker re-appears, slightly modified, in the book as the Googleplex Star Thinker; one of the most powerful computers in the universe, able to calculate the trajectories of all the sand particles in a five week sand blizzard—but a mere pocket calculator compared to Deep Thought, which can deal with the vectors of all the atoms in the Big Bang.

  Douglas Adams’ life was not one of continuous creative success. For nearly all the years he spent as one of the best-selling authors in the world there had been plans and meetings and more plans and more meetings to make a Hitch-hiker’s film. When he died he was still trying to get the movie made. Four years posthumously the film was released but twenty years of meetings added to twenty years planning seemed to suck away some of the fun.

  And through most of the nineties a tremendous endeavour had been working with a part-owned company called The Digital Village to create a speaking computer game called Starship Titanic. Understandably players had been sold, and bought into, Douglas-Adams-sized expectations and were underwhelmed when the game was finally ready. A second project foundered and would have sunk when the fin-de-millennium rage for interweb investment went ever-so-slightly off the boil. It was called H2G2 (not especially scrutable as code for The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy) with many of the forty staff in The Digital Village creating an ‘earth edition’. This was to be an online encyclopaedia with the then novel difference of being created, in part, by user submissions. (Douglas Adams was user number 42). The idea was pulled off the rocks by the BBC which continues to fund its existence but it failed to attract a critical mass of contributors, the thing Wikipedia was to achieve and which lead to a naturally growing number of both users and contributors. This then ultimately allows—along with Google—the kind of research needed to assemble a book like this one, which probably wouldn’t have been possible, even with almost unlimited time, in the most impressive physical library. This may or may not, of course, be seen as a good thing.

  Douglas Adams part predicted and part shaped the future. His funny Babel fish in-ear translator exists in name as an online translation service. But think of it as a step on the road to a translating mobile phone. As a tribute to Deep Thought, Deep Blue was adopted as the name for a computer that beat the world chess champion (inter-game fixes lead to a disputed outcome and a re-match was refused by the computer’s agent). And just yesterday in the paper I read that the new Stephen Hawking book explains how you and I are choosing from amongst infinities of histories most of which are highly improbable but all of which extend from the moment of the Big Bang. At that moment I chose to recall the similarity between such an incredible idea and Douglas Adams’ explanation of the principle behind his infinite improbability drive.

  And if another hitch-hiker’s guide in the far future has only a little space to describe the achievements of an ape descendant called Douglas Adams, then that should still be fine. He was the thinker who created the forty two joke. Try googling ‘the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything’. In under zero-point-four-two seconds the Great Google Brain will have allocated your task to a sub-neuron or two, read your question, trailed a finger through an unimaginably long index, then found, written out and posted to you the answer…it is 42. I believe Douglas Adams would have liked that very much indeed.

  * Popularly known as ‘Mrs Starke’s’, the title was Information and directions for the use of travellers on the continent. Mrs Starke had introduced a novel idea. Using one to four exclamation marks she summarised her opinion of each attraction. (The news that 186 years later her guide is available to a traveller as a 1.4 Mb ebook downloadable onto a wireless Kindle would, I believe, have moved Mrs Starke into performing a Spinal Tap and nudging her scale to a fifth exclamation mark.)

  ** The saddest and most ultimately misguided use ever made of a travel guide happened in WWII when Germany, in retaliation for British bombing of historic and popular Lübeck and Rostock, bombed the English provincial towns of Bath, Canterbury, Exeter, Norwich and York—because each had been awarded drei Stern in the Baedeker Tourist Guide to Britain.

  * Three are reproduced in Don’t Panic, Neil Gaiman’s biography of Douglas Adams. Above Douglas Adams’ name is a schoolbook margin drawing of the constellati
on of Ursa Major. The neatly typed effect created by neatly typing had been sacrificed during the taxi ride to the big meeting at the BBC with the star’s name, one Aleric B, being crossed out, several times, and replaced with the hand-written Arthur Dent. One has to wonder where Aleric B is now? Might there have been a spot of bother? The actors’ union Equity has no record of him.

  * Paul Allen has donated a considerable sum to a project in-part searching for extraterrestrial life and based at the University of California, Berkeley. Choosing to reference Douglas Adams, the first phase of development for the Allen Telescope Array required 42 radio telescopes.

  Appendix X: Conspiracy Theories

  Opinions of 1000 UK adults surveyed in June 2010 by The Survey Shop.

  Q. Which of the following do you believe are true, or may be true? True, or may be true True

  A secret US department creates false conspiracy theories to discredit genuine conspiracy theories. 72% 14%

  The US Government is hiding facts about the 1947 Roswell alien 64% 16%

  Osama bin Laden is dead 63% 4%

  President Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA 62% 7%

  The Large Hadron Collider might create a black hole 49% 11%

  Time travel will become possible within 100 years 34% 4%

  All statistics are false 34% 10%

  The Americans did not land on the moon 24% 5%

  Hitler faked his death 20% 2%

  Elvis Presley is still alive 4% 1%

  Michael Jackson is still alive 4% 1%

  Appendix Y: Forty two theories

  The opinions of 204 adults who had read The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy and responded that the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything was forty two. Conducted in June 2010 by The Survey Shop.

  Q. The following are valid possible reasons why Douglas Adams chose the number 42 in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy. In your opinion which is most likely to be true and which are either possible or unlikely? (any) Most likely to be true

  He had no reason, but it had to be a number he hadn’t already used 25%

  In the 1971 book which inspired his title, Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to Europe, page 42 is the first page of the chapter about Britain and Ireland and part of it is devoted to ‘the most puzzling question of all’ 20%

  He was following Lewis Carroll, who liked using forty-two and had a rule 42 in Alice in Wonderland and also called The Hunting of the Snark an agony in eight fits, meaning parts, just as each radio episodes was also called a fit. 18%

  The 42 joke comes towards the end of the fourth of six episodes. He admitted later that after writing the first four at that stage he ran out of ideas for the last two episodes 14%

  Douglas Adams was struggling to succeed when at the age of 24 the BBC agreed to the first pilot radio show and he switched the digits of that special age 7%

  As an English student he had been used to seeing the library code 420 on his books at university 4%

  Elvis Presley died at the age of 42 with enormous media coverage at the same time that Douglas Adams was writing the radio scripts 4%

  As a teenager, his father had a ‘James Bond’ type Aston Martin DB5. D and B are the 4th and 2nd letters of the alphabet 2%

  Appendix Z: Numerology of the Hitch-hiker’s Guide

  To show the numbers at work in The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the plug in the bottom of the Marianas trench has been pulled out to allow all the words and single digit numbers to flow from The Original Radio Scripts and leave the double digit plus numbers flapping and gasping in the mud:

  Fit the First

  53 is the number of extra things to do when getting more from zero gravity

  15 years is the length of time Ford Prefect had been stranded on Earth

  35 seconds elapse before Ford Prefect joins the story

  12 minutes to go until the end of the Earth

  30 tonnes is the weight a sick pachyderm able to drink more than a couple or three Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters

  6 thousand million people hadn’t glanced into the ionosphere recently

  28 pence is the price of four packets of peanuts

  One minute and 35 seconds left until the end of the world

  30 Altairian dollars per day is what the hitch-hiker has to see the Galaxy

  72 hours is the time required for the refit of a Vogon spaceship

  100 billion new worlds could be explored instead of returning to Earth (and also the number of stars in the Galaxy)

  12 book epic of Vogon poetry is called ‘My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles’

  Fit the Second

  90 million miles between the unregarded sun and the insignificant planet

  2000 years had almost elapsed since a man had been nailed to a tree

  10 million tourists a year visit the pretty planet of Bethselamin

  30 seconds is about the time it will take to asphyxiate in space

  2267,709 to one are the odds against being rescued in space (and, of course, the number of the Islington flat)

  29 seconds elapses before being rescued

  2100,000, 275,000, 225,000 and 220,000 are the descending levels of improbability of being rescued from certain death

  57 is the kind of sub-meson brain to make some finite improbability

  1000 years hence is the time warp the Encyclopaedia Galactica fell through

  10 is the number of points available for a style mark

  1951 is the year when Fit the second will be repeated

  Fit the Third

  300 miles is the orbit altitude above Magrathea

  5 million years is the period of time that Magrathea has been dead

  15 seconds is left until missile impact

  547 and 78 are part of the evasive action to escape the missiles

  8,767,128 are the odds against missiles turning into petunias and a whale

  50,000 is the number of times Marvin is more intelligent than Trillian

  60 thousand Altairian dollars are being paid into Veet Voojagig’s account

  10 million years is needed to find the Ultimate Question

  Fit the Fourth

  7½ million is the number of years Deep Thought will take to compute the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything

  75 thousand generations ago the ancestors set the programme running

  Forty two is the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything

  One million star cruisers at the command of the G’Gugvant leader

  1000 glaciers are poised to roll in Africa

  Fit the Fifth

  10 million years three times is how long Marvin had waited

  576,324 and 576,326 are the geo-social pages in the book’s glossary

  6,800 miles is one side of a ningi, the 3-sided bit of small change

  576,000 years they had been propelled through time

  100,000 is the number of black battle cruisers behind them

  £597,000,812,406.07 is the price of the book’s postage and packaging

  Fit the Sixth

  30 parsecs—radius of sphere within which someone’s as clever as Marvin

  573 is the number of committee meetings that haven’t discovered fire

  2 million years is the time the race will survive and for Arthur to be born

  10 billion people were killed on the planet used in intergalactic bar billiards

  30 points were scored according to The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy

  Caecum A: The 42 Explanations

  There were 23 years in which Douglas Adams might have given a definitive explanation of why he chose forty two but he kept the magic dry and never gave the entire story.

  Lewis Who?

  One of the earliest explanations on record followed the publication of Life, the Universe and Everything in 1982. The interview was with John Shirley for a science fiction magazine called, confusingly, Heavy Metal. Douglas Adams was asked whether a part of the Restaurant at the End of the Universe was a ‘deliberate reference to Lewis Carro
ll’, seeming mildly irked to be hearing about this again he emphatically corrected the interviewer before running on to answer the forty two question unprompted:

  ‘No. It isn’t actually. Lewis Carroll, curiously enough, I read when I was a little kid, and it frightened me to bits and I couldn’t bear it since. A number of people keep on saying that Lewis Carroll uses forty two quite a lot and find some significance in that. But if I’d used the number thirty nine other people would have found references in other people’s books for that number, and so on and so forth. As far as children’s books are concerned a much stronger influence would be Winnie the Pooh. Because Milne’s writing is wonder—it’s easy to read and beautifully written, worth having a look at again.’

  ‘Used’ could be a very significant verb: ‘if I had used thirty nine’ seems to show that the Ultimate Answer did not have to be forty two.