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  42

  Douglas Adams’

  Amazingly Accurate Answer

  to

  Life, the Universe and Everything

  Peter Gill

  By the Same Author

  The Principles and Practice of Electric Fencing

  Numbers exist only in the mind.

  Robert M Pirsig

  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

  Page 42

  For Hannah, Eleanor, Francesca, Phoebe and Camilla

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Best Joke in The World

  A Number of Facts

  Earth

  Douglas Adams

  A is for Americana

  Notables

  Health, Foods and Diets

  Sport

  Art and Literature

  Excellent Science

  Crime, Mystery, and Disaster

  The Universe

  Hollywood Signs

  Good Vibrations

  And Everything

  But Why 42?

  Appendices

  Caecum A: The 42 Explanations

  Some Interesting Reads…

  Acknowledgements

  Errors and omissions

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The Best Joke in The World

  News came out last summer that the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington DC had a new exhibit—the original Kermit the Frog. If you are thinking ‘Who’s Smithson?’ then, a) I admire your grit in having resisted calls to stand a little closer to mainstream thinking, and b) he was British and never visited Washington, or America come to that. And to stop anyone discerning his motive he was careful not to know even one American before leaving a sizeable fortune to start ‘a museum that really rocks’, as I believe Jim Smithson wrote. (If you are thinking ‘So how is it that Kermit can still talk to me on the TV now he’s in the Smithsonian and all?’, then I don’t know, but that salesperson—the one smiling over there—will be happy to help you buy this interesting book which I know you’ll love reading.)

  Smithsonian generosity means we are lacking a Smithsonian in Britain but our museums are still great, being filled with much that belongs to us although that isn’t the point—the reason for us being here together on this line is to know that there is time, just, for us to act with regard to the international cultural treasure that has even greater significance for Britons than green felt has for Americans. The British Museum must acquire Forty two.

  The true significance of Forty two to the British nation can be confirmed very easily because this is a national census year and one final question now just needs adding: ‘What is the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything?’ Unhesitatingly four in ten people in Britain will say to a stranger in a Jedi robe with a clipboard and cheap green retractable: ‘Forty two’. This is twenty million people*, a number greater than that of total votes cast for both David Cameron and Ed Miliband’s parties in the last election. How much longer, you are thinking, can the British Museum fail to recognise the need to ensure that Forty two is preserved and kept safe in Britain?

  When and how Douglas Adams first knew the world needed an Ultimate Answer are excellent questions (were you just wondering about Kermit back there?). The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy was first broadcast on radio by the BBC thirty-three years ago. The book has become the world’s best-selling humorous novel through the simple virtue of still being funny in many different countries and languages. Forty two has become the best known joke in the world. Try thinking of another. Our existence we share with galaxies, slime moulds, coelacanths and literally everything else; but only people share jokes. (The PG tea chimps in the TV ads were trying to shift peanut butter from the roofs of their mouths and not the piano.) Such deep and international fondness means big players are reaching into very deep pockets to acquire Forty two. Here are ten reasons why the proper home can only ever be the British Museum.

  The Proposals Los Problemos

  The Guggenheim, Bilbao Too many ‘g’s

  The Prada, Madrid Not enough ‘g’s

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, New York City, New York, USA Too long

  The Louvre, Paris Quarante deux? Mais je ne pense pas, mon ami.

  The Uffizi, Florence Too many naked bodies around, remember, impressionable teenagers will be visiting in search of the answer to the meaning of life

  The Deutsches Museum, Munich A 4-2 from England? The country is still way too sore over the 1966 ‘Wembley goal’

  The Getty Museum, Los Angeles Can’t afford it

  The Hermitage, St Petersburg Too pokey

  The Australian Museum, Sydney Their proposed location is beside the collections of Really Long Snakes and Really Big Spiders

  The Smithsonian, Washington Washington We just gave you the museum

  The boldest of the bold is the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. There, canny curators have moved already to acquire Gaugin’s world famous, meaning-of-life painting that is called Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? The massive masterpiece is widely recognised as the most apposite of companion works for display with Forty two and a large new wing should be sufficiently capacious to accommodate the leap in visitor footfall caused by crowds rushing to see the two works hang beside each other for the first time. An admirable idea people of Boston, I like your thinking, but perhaps wasting good British tea was not the smart way to start negotiations?

  Yes, it’s going to be tough, but it simply has to be the British Museum that wins (probably through a combination of home advantage and the indigenous knack for penalty shootouts). And then it won’t be a moment too soon for Britain to honour Douglas Adams in a fitting way. A fifth plinth of four in London’s Trafalgar Square must be erected for the man who first knew that the answer to any really interesting question is always Forty two.

  Peter Gill

  Shropshire

  January 1st 2011

  * The same research (Appendix X) also showed that one in ten adults—about five million people—believe that all statistics are false. This means they don’t think they exist in a census and so the real population of the United Kingdom for the next ten years is 92%.

  A Number of Facts

  Critical Heat

  A human body temperature of 42°C, just five degrees over normal, is called hyperpyrexia and requires action to bring about cooling to prevent death. It is a normal body temperature for a chicken.

  Just Add ένας

  Only 37 countries have one or more buildings with 42nd floors although in some of them, including the United States, a 42nd floor would only be the 41st floor in other countries such as the UK where ground level is floor zero rather than floor one. To avoid confusion when seeking their hotel room, American visitors to Europe should add one to the floor number when in London, un in Paris, uno in Rome, ένας in Athens and so on.

  Wiki42

  According to Nostalgia Wikipedia the 42nd oldest page on Wikipedia may have been the one that describes the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution which allowed women the vote. (It is not known for sure because the nature of Wikipedia is that pages can be merged and disappear). The 19th Amendment was first proposed in 1878 and introduced in every subsequent session of Congress, it was finally passed in 1920, after a wait of 42 years, when Tennessee ratified the amendment. The final US state to ratify the women’s right vote was Mississippi, in 1984.

  42 Commando

  Know only one thing before approaching the elite trained killers of the marines battalion 42 Commando. It is never ‘forty-two’. Always say ‘Four two. Sir’.

  Drinking In History

  They may now float innocuously in your
Coke or lemonade beverage but every ice-cube made from rainwater contains more molecules than is decently believable from the iceberg responsible for the sinking of the Titanic. I didn’t believe them myself, but having checked, re-checked and re-re-checked my conclusion is that because of the slow mixing of the world’s oceans, especially the deep oceans, the figures could as easily be under-estimates as over-estimates.

  If you are running this as a calculation with the family on a drizzly afternoon here are some of the things you should factor in: firstly the radical lack of size of a molecule of water: a single lightly oversized teaspoon of precisely 6.4ml of water contains the same number of water molecules as there are lightly over-sized teaspoons of 6.4ml of water in the whole world. That includes all the oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, polar icecaps and everything. The second figure is the estimated 42,070,000 cubic kilometres of water that have evaporated from the world’s oceans and fallen as rain since the Titanic had a bad day. The significance of this is that nearly all rain is from the metre of ocean water evaporated into the air every year from the comparatively lively ocean surface which only very slowly swaps places with the great volume of deep water. Even after 99 years the waters of the deep oceans are mostly still down there and largely unchanged other than having to make some space for the occasional large ship.

  Your beverage Estimated number of millions of molecules from the iceberg that sank the Titanic

  A pint of bitter 1,400

  A cup of tea 700

  Coke (USA super-size 42 oz. cup) 2,900

  An ice cube 24

  A slice of lemon 20

  Australian schooner of lager 1,050

  One day, far into the future—when all of the world’s water has had time to get thoroughly mixed—an ice cube will be guaranteed to contain only 2.4 million molecules of Titanic iceberg.

  Don’t Panic

  Even a casual relationship with this book could lead to the idea that the number forty two gets about more than it should. The truth is that I have been particular. Not long after starting the garden disappeared under a heaving, mewling midden of wannabe interesting numbers, some pleading accompanying gossip of the most salacious kind which I know you would have loved to read about—but I could not proffer them house-room. All had to be ejected on the grounds of not being a natural integer between forty one and forty three. Whisper it low, forty two is no more common or uncommon that it should be. Numbers go down. The chart of their frequency has spikes and dips but follows a simple rule: more smaller numbers and fewer larger numbers.

  Google has thoughtfully done the legwork and counted all your favourite numbers. Search for your old friends and you will see that compared to forty two there are about four percent more forty ones and three percent fewer forty threes, and 23% more thirty twos and six percent fewer fifty twos. Thankfully the phenomenon of import still holds—the most interesting facts are always forty two.

  Units of Utter Unlikeliness—Triple ‘U’s

  Two of my favourite Wikipedia pages are the lists of unusual and humorous units. Here are a few suitable for everyday use with or without forty two.

  Measuring Unlikely Unit

  Length (really short) The beard second is the distance the average beard grows in one second. New Intel high power computer chips use 4.4 beard second separations to align billions of transistors into a fingernail’s area.

  Numbers (really large) The astronomer, Carl Sagan, calculated that filling the entire volume of the observed universe with paper printed with zeroes wouldn’t get even close to being enough paper to print out all of a googleplex.

  Funny distances As the most diminutive new student of 1958, Oliver Smoot was used to mark out distances across Harvard Bridge (364.4 smoots ± one ear). The painted markings on Smoot Bridge have been maintained ever since. Google Earth offers you the smoot as a valid unit of measurement alongside miles, yards and inches. And believe it not, Smoot became the Chairman of the ISO—the world’s official measuring things organisation.

  Speaking (slow) Paul Dirac, a predecessor of Stephen Hawking as Lucasian Professor at Cambridge, had his precise and careful thinking honoured by having the dirac defined as blethering at a rate of one word per hour.

  Time (really short) A yoctosecond is a measurement of time so brief that it takes close to 4.2 yoctoseconds for light to travel across the diameter of a proton.

  Beauty To be safe, use milli-helens. One milli-helen is needed to launch one ship and so on, up to a whole Helen.

  Magic Forty two thaums of magic is sufficient to create either the same number of white pigeons or 126 billiard balls. Defined by author Terry Pratchett in Discworld.

  Volume (lots) Running out of places to put Olympic-sized swimming pools? Switch to the more convenient Sydharb—the volume of water contained in Sydney Harbour. Even the flow of the Amazon would take approximately forty two minutes to refill a freshly drained Sydney Harbour, You might want to relax your grip on the nozzle when the level is coming up to the Opera House.

  Wasted time A microfortnight is a little longer than a second.

  Cosmic

  bogglement (the easy winner) A barn-megaparsec (bMpc) is derived from the infinitesimally small measure of area called a barn which you use when in your nuclear physics trousers, times’d by the vast distance of a megaparsec, about 19 million trillion miles, which you need with your astronomer’s baseball hat on.

  The result is a barn-megaparsec, or 3/5 of a teaspoon.

  Fourth Flaws

  In regions of East Asia, including parts of China, tall buildings often avoid having a 42nd floor because of tetraphobia, the fear of the number four stemming from the words four and death sounding the same (si or sei). Asian buildings commonly skip floors 4, 14, 24, 34, and the full nine yards between 40 and 49. Forty-nine is considered especially unlucky in Japan as it sounds like ‘pain until death’.

  Earth

  The Great Attraction

  The earth, due to its spin, is a little over 42km fatter in diameter across the equator than it is when the tape goes around the north and south poles. This difference makes the 20,565ft summit of Mount Chimborazo in South America the piece of ground that is furthest away from the centre of the planet. Shaped like a classic volcano cone, and gloriously isolated from other eminences, it was believed to be Earth’s highest mountain until the early 19th century, which is still true in a way as the summit is more than seven thousand feet further from the very centre of the Earth than the top of Mount Everest.

  Mount Chimborazo was climbed first by Edward Whymper, a singular* English mountaineer who had been first to the summit of the fearsome Matterhorn, and was also the first person to travel the fastest by standing still. He achieved this feat the day he climbed Cayambe, a 19,000 foot volcano close to where the equator crosses the Andes, the only place to find permanent snow on the equator and some 42 miles north-east of Quito, capital of Ecuador. The top of Cayambe is spinning round the earth’s axis at about 1,671km an hour which is all of one and half kilometres an hour faster than it is on the equator at sea level. Having summited it is unlikely that Edward Whymper ejaculated ‘Whoo-hoo!’ in the manner of Mr Simpson; he almost certainly didn’t know he was the fastest stationary man on earth.

  If this velocity seems very quick be assured that it is no such thing: in the previous sixty minutes you and I have travelled a ridiculous two and a quarter million kilometres or thereabouts as the galaxy that is our home, the Milky Way, comprising one to four hundred billion stars plus associated planets, moons, asteroids, comets, UFO sightings, etc. is ineluctably moved in the direction of something called, with entirely appropriate use of capital letters, the Great Attractor. In the pithy dialect of astrophysicists, this is a ‘gravity anomaly’ created by the supercluster of galaxy clusters called Hydra Centaurus—but space is so big that, unless you are an astrophysicist, absolutely nothing appears to be happening.

  KC and the Sunshine Problem

  South of Astronomy Precinct on Big Island, Hawaii is
Mauna Loa. This is Mauna Kea’s twin peak and is the largest shield volcano (made by lava flows) on earth. Measurements begun there in 1958 are, literally, of serious interest. A scientist called Charles Keeling had just invented a way to measure carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere and selected Hawaii and the South Pole as suitable places to capture the cleanest air. He already expected to see that it was on the increase. In three years he had sufficient data to alert anyone who cared that the amount of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere was rising each year—and by about the same amount expected from the speed at which we were burning fuel. The Mauna Loa measurements have continued ever since—known as the Keeling Curve.

  The curve is very significant. The line showing how much CO2 you just breathed in has risen more quickly every year. Mauna Loa sample #1 was taken in March 1958 and came in at 316 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide. Within just a part of one lifetime when Keeling died in June 2005 the atmosphere had 21% more CO2 than it had in 1958 and the curve is showing no sign of taking a breather—it will race through the 420 ppm mark in about 13 years time.