Deep Thought took 7.5 million years to calculate this answer, and this is all Deep Thought had to say about it. Arthur Dent has the Ultimate Question stored in his mind subconsciously. It is revealed in the following books that the subconscious question was drawn out of him by drawing random Scrabble tiles. The message said "What do you get if you multiply six by nine?" The answer is obviously 54, but Deep Thought's answer was 42. Dent sees this and says, "I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe." Even though an ordinary game of Scrabble only contains 2 Y's, this message managed to have 3.
But why the number 42? Douglas Adams was asked many times why he chose the number 42. Many theories were proposed, including that 42 is 101010 in binary code; some readers noticed that 6 × 9 = 42 when using base 13. Douglas Adams later joked about this observation, saying, "I may be a sorry case, but I don't write jokes in base 13." Light refracts off water by 42 degrees to create a rainbow, and light requires 10−42 seconds to cross the diameter of a proton. Adams rejected all of these theories. On November 3, 1993, he gave an answer on alt.fan.douglas-adams:
"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."
It is evident that Adams was merely trying to be humorous by this. He had stated that he chose a random number.
But why the number 42? Douglas Adams was asked many times why he chose the number 42. Many theories were proposed, including that 42 is 101010 in binary code; some readers noticed that 6 × 9 = 42 when using base 13. Douglas Adams later joked about this observation, saying, "I may be a sorry case, but I don't write jokes in base 13." Light refracts off water by 42 degrees to create a rainbow, and light requires 10−42 seconds to cross the diameter of a proton. Adams rejected all of these theories. On November 3, 1993, he gave an answer on alt.fan.douglas-adams:
"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."
It is evident that Adams was merely trying to be humorous by this. He had stated that he chose a random number.