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Hitchhiker's Guide Turns 30
XaN-ASMoDi writes "Yesterday saw the 30th anniversary of the very first broadcast of Douglas Adam's seminal work, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", to mark this, Mark Vernon has written an article for the BBC News Magazine on the answer to The Question.
'It's 30 years since Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy made its debut on BBC radio, but its most famous mystery is still waiting to be resolved...'"
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
For anyone who cares, there is a club in Ottawa, Ontario called the Zaphod Beeblebrox, and yes, they do sell Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.
How many squares are there on a go board?
...got to go there if you truly adore this book. Like all goodMuch fun!
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Well, 42 is the product of the 2^0th, the 2^1th and the 2^2th prime ... ...
But maybe it has nothing to do with math, but with the sound of it: "for tea, too." After all, tea plays an important role in the story
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
That he just made it up as a suitably non-sequitur answer. In fact, there are 42 Laws of Cricket, and cricket features heavily as a key plot mover in HHGG. Fenchurch is easily explained. It's a joke about people who name their offspring after where they think they were conceived (e.g. Brooklyn?). Fenchurch Street was the grubbiest and most dismal of the London railway termini at the time, and that was saying a lot. To have a particularly beautiful (and randy) woman conceived by her parents at Fenchurch St. Station in a moment of boredom is pure Adams.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Correct.
The ultimate question is "Think of a number, any number" to which the correct answer is "42".
Which immediately suggests such as penultimate questions: "Why is that the ultimate question?" "Why does it have a correct answer?" and "Why is 42 the correct answer?"
Which D.A. explained quite succinctly by saying "The road to wisdom is infinitely long. It doesn't matter which end you start at." --MarkusQ
In 2020, HHGTG will be 42 years old. I find it odd how much of Douglas Adams' stuff just works out neatly.
Harrods has a brand of Earl Grey known as No. 42. (Review here ). Given that DNA was very particular about his tea, it's not that much of a stretch that the number was floating around in the back of his mind for that very reason.
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Since the introduction in the Hitchhikers Guide it has become the least randomly selected number between 0 and 100.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
It has many interesting features. Namely:
42 is the product of the first three terms of Sylvester's sequence; like the first four such numbers it is also a primary pseudoperfect number.
It is the sum of the totient function for the first eleven integers.
It is a Catalan number.
It is the reciprocal of a Bernoulli number.
It is conjectured to be the scaling factor in the leading order term of the "sixth moment of the Riemann zeta function".
In base 10, this number is a Harshad number and a self number, while it is a repdigit in base 4 (as 222).
The eight digits of pi beginning from 242,422 places after the decimal point are 42424242.
The first digit (4) taken to the power of the second digit (2) is equal to the second digit (2) taken to the power of the first digit (4): 42 = 24 = 16. It follows clearly that 24 exhibits the same characteristic, and in fact 24 is the only other two-digit non-repdigit number that does. (All two-digit repdigit numbers exhibit this characteristic.)
The number 42 appears in various contexts in Christianity. There are 42 generations (names) in the Gospel of Matthew's version of the Genealogy of Jesus; it is prophesied that for 42 months the Beast will hold dominion over the Earth (Revelation 13:5); 42 men of Beth-azmaveth were counted in the census of men of Israel upon return from exile (Ezra 2:24); God sent bears to maul 42 of the youths who mock Elisha for his baldness (2 Kings 2:23), etc.
42 is the number with which God creates the Universe in Kabalistic tradition.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
"Er, five," said the mattress.
"Wrong," said Marvin. "You see?"
The mattress was much impressed by this and realized that it was in the presence of a not unremarkable mind. It willomied along its entire length, sending excited little ripples through its shallow algae-covered pool. And then Eddie: When it became clear that Prak could not be stopped, that here was truth in its absolute and final form, the court was cleared.
Not only cleared, it was sealed up, with Prak still in it. Steel walls were erected around it, and, just to be on the safe side, barbed wire, electric fences, crocodile swamps and three major armies were installed, so that no one would ever have to hear Prak speak.
"That's a pity," said Arthur. "I'd like to hear what he had to say. Presumably he would know what the Ultimate Question to the Ultimate Answer is. It's always bothered me that we never found out."
"Think of a number," said the computer, "any number."
Arthur told the computer the telephone number of King's Cross railway station passenger inquiries, on the grounds that it must have some function, and this might turn out to be it. And in this case, Eddie was responding directly to Arthur's query about the question and answer.
And it is so Douglas Adams' style to tell you something at the start of a book and bring it back for the very end. He did it again in "Mostly Harmless" wrt Stavro Mueller and his clubs. He did it in "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" with the sofa. IIRC, even the computer game for THHGTTG requires that you do something very early in the game just right or else you can't finish it.
Sadly, Eddie's line, "Think of a number, any number," didn't make it in to the completion of the radio series.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?