"Six by nine. Forty two."
"That's it. That's all there is."
"I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe"
...
Well as most people know, the “answer” to this question (in the Hitchhikers universe) is 42.
When Douglas Adams was asked whether he invented this question because six times nine is actually 54, which is 42 when written in base thirteen, he replied:
"I may be a sorry case, but I don't write jokes in base 13."
Then what was it based in?
As seen in this answer, Doug Adams chose 42 (the answer) randomly:
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 thirteen, 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.
but where did he get the question from?
Update
By question I mean
"What do you get if you multiply six by nine?"
Where did Douglas Adams come up with that question to come out of letters from a Scrabble set? A Scrabble set does not even have all of those letters!
Answer
It's established (or at least strongly hinted) that modern humans are descendants of the Golgafrinchans from Ark B.
"Can you imagine what a world would be like descended from those ... cretins we arrived with?" he said.
"Imagine?" said Ford, rising his eyebrows. "We don't have to imagine. We've seen it."
"But ..." Arthur waved his arms about hopelessly.
"We've seen it," said Ford, "there's no escape."
(All of the quotes in this answer are from Chapter 34 of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.)
So the implication is therefore Arthur and his fellow humans weren't entirely integrated parts of the computer Earth. Shortly before the Scrabble sequence, he and Ford have this conversation:
"Still, something must have come out of it," he said at last, "because Marvin said he could see the Question printed in your brain wave patterns."
"But ..."
"Probably the wrong one, or a distortion of the right one. It might give us a clue though if we could find it. I don't see how we can though."
(Ford speaks first. Emphasis mine.)
So six times nine wasn't necessarily the question, but it might have been close. Or not. Who knows, the Golgafrinchans essentially prevented the Earth from meeting its purpose.
As for the Scrabble set, note that Arthur had made it himself:
What he was doing was rather curious, and this is what it was: on a wide flat piece of rock he had scratched out the shape of a large square, subdivided into one hundred and sixty-nine smaller squares, thirteen to a side. Furthermore he had collected together a pile of smallish flattish stones and scratched the shape of a letter on to each.
Could you fashion a set of Scrabble letters with the exactly right letter frequencies if you were plopped into the distant past amongst Golgafrinchans and Neanderthals? I doubt it.
However, at another point in the chapter, a Neanderthal spells a flawless "forty two" (this is the inspiration for trying to get The Question with the tiles), despite the set later not containing the letter R. You can probably throw "Douglas Adams ignoring continuity for the sake of a joke" into the mix without surprising anyone.
Comments
Post a Comment