The Tool Desk
Outbyte PC Repair FREEClear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Outbyte Driver Updater FREEFix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →The answer is 42—the answer Deep Thought gives to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The joke is that nobody has the question to go with it. The number is a fictional punchline, not a scientific or philosophical conclusion.
Why is 42 the answer?
Deep Thought, a supercomputer in Adams’s story, spends millions of years calculating the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. It returns 42, but the result is no use without knowing what question it answers. The certainty of the number and the absence of a meaningful question are the joke.
The story later describes Earth as an organic computer built to work out the Ultimate Question. In the radio episode “Fit the Fourth,” dated 29 March 1978 in the BBC synopsis, Earth is destroyed shortly before its program is complete. A Scrabble test then produces the question “what do you get if you multiply six by nine?” That absurd turn is part of the comedy, not an ordinary arithmetic derivation of 42.
Did Douglas Adams choose 42 for a hidden meaning?
Adams’s explanation was that he chose an ordinary number, not a coded cosmic truth. Quote Investigator reproduces a statement attributed to Adams in a footnote to the 1985 collection The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts: “In fact it was simply chosen because it was a completely ordinary number, a number not just divisible by two but also by six and seven. In fact it’s the sort of number that you could, without any fear, introduce to your parents.” The Quote Investigator account gives the attribution and bibliographic context.
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That explanation is more straightforward than popular theories that assign 42 a secret mathematical or symbolic code. Its ordinariness is the point: the number sounds definite, but it does not resolve the vast question attached to it.
Is there a real mathematical answer involving 42?
Yes, but it answers a different question. In 2019, MIT News reported that Andrew Booker and Andrew Sutherland found integers whose cubes sum to 42, solving the equation x³ + y³ + z³ = 42:
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42 = (−80538738812075974)³ + 80435758145817515³ + 12602123297335631³
The computation used more than 400,000 volunteers’ home PCs and a search bound of 10¹⁷, according to MIT News’s 2019 report. It is a result in number theory—not a solution to the fictional question about life, the universe or everything.
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| Which “42”? | Question | Domain and evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Deep Thought’s answer | What is the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything? | Fictional comedy, described in the radio-series synopsis and publisher material. |
| Sum of three cubes | Can three integer cubes sum to 42? | Number theory; the solution was reported by MIT News in 2019. |
What was the question?
That is the unresolved part of the famous riddle. The story’s later “six by nine” line offers a deliberately surreal answer to the mystery, but it does not turn 42 into a coherent solution to an established question. Penguin’s description of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Albums captures the distinction by revealing the answer as 42 and asking what the question was: Penguin’s page for the audio collection.
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