Do you know what’s 42!?
If you do not know the significance of 42 then you are definitely not a nerd, nor have you read the novel by author Douglas Adams written in 1979 called “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, the first in a series of five!
For now if you are worried that this will be a spoiler, well then it is not! The novel is actually a guide within the guide about how to Hitchhike to the Galaxy! Of course the Earth gets destroyed in the novel just so you know!
Now; towards the end of the book, the supercomputer Deep Thought reveals that the answer to the “Great Question” of “Life, the Universe and Everything” is “forty-two.”
Deep Thought takes 7.5 million years to calculate the answer to the ultimate question!
The characters tasked with getting that answer are disappointed because it is not very useful. Yet, as the computer points out, the question itself was vaguely formulated. To find the correct statement of the query whose answer is 42, the computer will have to build a new version of itself. That, too, will take time. The new version of the computer is Earth!
Now Douglas Adams did not think too much when he wrote the number 42 as the answer but this number is now a part of the GEEK culture with so many theories!
Like even now if you ask your search engine or AI variations of the question “What is the answer to everything?” it will most likely answer “42.”!
The number 42 also appears in different forms in the film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
In ancient Egyptian mythology, during the judgment of souls, the dead had to declare before 42 judges that they had not committed any of 42 sins!
The marathon distance of 42.195 kilometers corresponds to the legend of how far the ancient Greek messenger Pheidippides traveled between Marathon and Athens to announce victory over the Persians in 490 B.C. (The fact that the kilometer had not yet been defined at that time only makes the connection all the more astonishing!)
In Mathematics the special thing about this is that it is a Pronic number in that it’s the product of two consecutive integers (6 x 7)!
In the ASCII character set, 42 is the code for the asterisk (*), a wildcard character that can represent any other character or string of characters!
Some even propose that it was chosen because 42 is 101010 in binary code, others have pointed out that light refracts through a water surface by 42 degrees to create a rainbow, and others have commented that light requires 10−42 seconds to cross the diameter of a proton!
Another common theory is that 42 refers to the number of laws in cricket, a recurring theme of the books!
But it must be remembered that these are all simple analysis! It could simply have been the number of girls who had broken Douglas Adam’s heart! Then again; let us wait for some million years to find out the next answer! Just hope it is not 84 though! Or 52! Which is the age of the one with that legendary reverberating voice Kailash Kher!
Listen to his Koun Hain vo and sleep!
Shubh Ratri!
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