Douglas Adams wanted a number to be the “meaning of life”, as a way of mocking the use of computers at the time, and also the physicists who wanted to reduce the Universe to a single equation.
He asked his friend to think of the “funniest number in the world”. For reasons that remain mysterious, he chose 42.
There are a few conspiracy theories about why he chose 42. It’s a fairly significant number (read the wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/42_(number) ). But I think he just chose it at random.
If you google that very question you can spend hours reading the thoughts of people who’ve spent far too much time trying to explain something the author himself admitted was a joke. God bless the internet!
I think the other scientists have answered this question better than I could. All I have to add is a true story about a test that one of my tutors set at Oxford University. On the front of the questions booklet, there were the words, “DON’T PANIC.”
Comments
vegetablegarden commented on :
I think 42 is a VERY good number…