Puzzle Description:

to the ultimate question of life the universe and everything

#1: Kristen Vognild (kristen) on Sep 30, 2017

I would have expected no other result. :)

Richard Petty

Sounds about right for my bank account, but not sure about the universe thing.

Bill Clinton?!

For those who are unfamiliar with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aboZctrHfK8

I could have searched for the passage from the book (which I posted to Facebook on my 42nd birthday), but this works too. :)

I hear that the writer confided the actual question to a friend who promised to take the secret question to his grave. I wonder if he could be bribed at any amount to betray his friend, the writer. I wanna know!

"What is seven multiplied by eight?"

A more true-to-the-books scene of Deep Thought:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQWdMftKT3Q

This was from the tv series which was actually written by Douglas Adams. He unfortunately had no control over the production values, though. This scene wasn't too bad...

Joe... how do I put this? Doesn't 7x8 equal 56? I think the question you meant to pose is 7x6.

And for all I know, it could be the question, but I just think there would be more significance to it than that.

Aurelian, I have not known Joe to make a mistake. Note there are quotation marks around the question so it is a quote from something or someone. Google shows various quotes, but I'm unable to narrow it down at the moment.

Aargh. I couldn't remember the correct phrase, and google (and laziness) mislead me. The correct phrase is "What do you get when you multiply six by nine?" So close...

This is the question that The Answer answers. Kind of. It is the question as asked by a caveman several thousand years before the "computer" program that is the Earth is to end...

...It might be easier if you just read the book.

I'm probably never going to look into it, to be honest, but I acknowledge what you were going for. I see that you were quoting something else and not making a careless mistake.

In the book, the planet Earth was created as an even larger computer, to come up with the Question, but the data had grown corrupted over the centuries. Thus, Arthur Dent, native Earthling, wrote out an approximation of the possible Question, but it ended up as "what do you get when you multiply six by nine?"

Or Jackie Robinson's uniform number.

I'm going to take a stab at the question. Seven is considered the perfect number; the number of God. Six is the imperfect number; the number of man. So if you multiply God with man you get the answer to everything. Does that make any sense?

It's as good as any of the million other connections that people have made to this number. (Oddly, 6 is the first perfect number according to mathematics, where the sum of the factors equals the number)

Douglas Adams had his own reason for choosing 42, though. From dictionary.com:
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Why Adams chose 42 has been the subject of much speculation, but in 2007, on a fan-based Usenet newsgroup, Adams put the many conjectures to rest: “The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base 13, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought ’42 will do.’ I typed it out. End of story.”
=====

He has also stated that it just seemed like the funniest number, however a quick search failed to find that quote online.

Comment #6 leads me to believe there may have been more to it than that, but I actually like it more as a random number.

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