Is 42 the answer to life?

If you google “the answer to life the universe and everything” you will find the following as the top search result:

What? Is this a joke? How does it even make sense?

Douglas Adams, the famous English author and satirist, was the author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’’ in which a hyper-intelligent race of beings builds an enormous computer, called Deep Thought, to get an answer to the universe’s ultimate question about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. The computer asks them to come after 7.5 million years, the time it would take to compute the answer to this complicated question. When they come back after this eternal period, all excited to know the answer to this ultimate question, the computer gives them a very simple and supposedly off the wall answer: “42”

People, as fascinating as they are, proposed many theories to decipher Douglas’s secret motivations. A couple of points that I found amusing are:

• In computer programming, the asterisk (*) is a symbol that represents a wildcard, a variable input by the end-user and not by the computer program. It translates to “whatever you want it to be”. The ASCII code 42 is for the asterisk symbol, being a wildcard for everything.

• Rainbow is made when the sunlight passes through the raindrops (since there is a change in medium from air to water, the light refracts), and since white light is made of different coloured light — red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet — all with the different wavelengths — different colours bend at different angles. When sunlight hits a raindrop, the red light waves are bent at an angle of 42 degrees from their original direction from the sun
• The number 42 also propelled the curious minds to think of the coincidences whose significance is probably not worth the effort to figure out. To list a few: Titanic was travelling at a speed equivalent to 42km/hour when it collided with an iceberg; The atomic bomb that devastated Nagasaki, Japan, contained the destructive power of 42 million sticks of dynamite

Though when the author was asked about the importance of the number and the myriad thoughts/analyses of people, he dismissed them saying that the choice of number (42) was merely a joke — “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.”

Seems like indeed a perfectly normal number has/had captured the interest of nerds!