Original artwork, not a still
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy · 1979
The Answer to the Great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is... forty-two.
Behind the line
What it means
Our interpretation.
The punchline to every grand answer: the universe's biggest question gets the least dramatic reply imaginable, and the real lesson is that nobody had defined the question. Adams said he chose the number as a joke because it would do, which has never stopped fans reading binary, base thirteen and rainbow angles into it. Forty-two is now a nerd shibboleth, the one number a geek will answer with when asked what everything is about.
Context reviewed
In context
Spoilers for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the GalaxyShow the scene
The supercomputer Deep Thought was built by a race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings to calculate the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. When it is switched on, it says it must think and will need seven and a half million years. When the Day of the Answer finally comes, the descendants of the original programmers, Loonquawl and Phouchg, gather to hear it. Deep Thought confirms that the answer is 42, the programmers are appalled, and it tells them that the real problem is that they never knew what the question was. Deep Thought first appears in the second episode of the 1978 radio series.
Sources (2)
- Hitchhiker's wiki: Deep ThoughtArticle text and infoboxReference checked
- Hitchhiker's wiki: 42Inspiration for the number 42Reference checked
Context reviewed
