Humor Series: 42 Day

History of October 10

42 Day, from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

• Question: What is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.
• Answer: 42

Question: What does that mean?

I met Douglas Adams about 30 years ago when he spoke at Sun Microsystems, where I was working at the time. I have never heard anyone speak quite as fast as he did.

Douglas Adams was famous for creating The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a comedy science fiction series. First, it was available as a radio broadcast on the BBC, but later adapted to several novels, a TV series, a feature film, and a video game.

His “trilogy” of five books, plus a sixth posthumously, features an episode where our protagonist posits a question to the computer “Deep Thought,” which spends 7.5 million years calculating. Such an incredibly simple and succinct answer to an amazingly profound question leaves one wondering what the answer “42” means. He gets the answer

“What do you get if you multiply six by nine?”
“Six by nine. Forty two.”
“That’s it. That’s all there is.”
“I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe.”