Reflections on 42

Awoke too early this morning; couldn't sleep so watched a movie, The Jackie Robinson Story (1950), starring the real deal. I never realized until now that he wore the number 42. I didn’t know that every team in major league baseball retired the number 42 in his honour!  It did give me cause for further reflection on the number 42 which has always been prominent in my life; my favourite to this day.

Did you know that in, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn, “the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything” from the supercomputer, Deep Thought? Built specifically for this purpose, after 7½ million years of computing and checking the answer, Deep Thought determines it to be 42!

Douglas Adams, creator of the science fiction series, was asked many times why he chose the number 42. Many complex theories were proposed but Adams rejected them all. Then on November 3, 1993, he finally revealed why, saying, “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.”

So there you have it - chosen because it was, “An ordinary, smallish number.” I do not think that I would have imagined 42 as, “the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything.” But I would maintain it is a number assigned to some over the years who have accomplished the extraordinary, or striven for it!  Yes, for them, it really was a matter of, “42 will do!”