Z0N3 wrote:
Z0N3 wrote:
Tamaninja wrote:
42
Eyy you read a book
but what you really need to know is what is the question?
If you seen the television adaptation as well as read the book, the question is presumed to be simply "
What do you get when you multiply six by seven?". However, the
2005 movie states it to be "
How many Vogons does it take to change a lightbulb?".
Another case is that the question is "
What do you get if you multiply six by nine?" which
written in 'base 13' would be
42, and not 54. Though Douglas Adam has joked that "he does not make jokes in base 13".
Explanation for what 'base 13' is in spoilers:
Your ten fingers are the reason that our number system goes to nine and starts over. If humankind had one less finger, then we would go to 8 and then start over, and 10 would actually be 9, 100 would actually be 81, and 1000 would actually be 729. We would be counting in base nine.
Now what if you had thirteen fingers instead of ten? Well then we would all have been counting all along with thirteen different one-digit symbols (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B, and C) and THEN we would start over. So the number 10 would actually be the number 13, and so on, and so forth, and six times nine would equal forty two.
Ultimately, no one knows what the question is. Douglas Adam himself when asked where this idea of 42 came from, said:
“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 on my desk, stared in to the garden and thought 42 will do. I typed it out. End of story."