42 turned out to be the answer,

[Tegan]

...at least to the universe, if not to life (or liff) and everything.

What was that - about a year ago? 2 years? Somebody released some kind of results showing that 42 actually was the answer to some grand, all-encompasing cosmological question. But what was the question - the number of iterations of the successive collapse and re-expansion of the universe or something like that, I think?

I was sort of peripherally aware of the significance of The Number in the works of Douglas Adams - that is, I had read The Hitchiker' Guide, but had pretty much forgotten that there was this matter of The Number that was The Answer in the story. Then I read/heard of this big scientific discovery, and someone made the connection (I had an "oh! yeah, that's right!" moment), but I never made note of the news story so I could find it again, and now I'm wondering what it was.

Anyone know?

[ToSeek]

I'm afraid I can't help you, Miss Jovanka, but welcome to the boards anyway.

[newt]

Not to split hairs, but I thought the answer was: 43! Cheers. (And that was a while ago, so memory may not serve).

[Wingnut Ninja]

I had a friend who like to use one of those "prove anything" equations (where you do some fancy way of dividing by zero and keep it unnoticed) to "prove" that all kinds of things were equal to 42.

[David Hall]

Don't forget, seven times nine equals forty-two.*





*in base-13

[g99]

See i always thought that everything always equals 4. :-)

[ToSeek]

This paper determined a value for the Hubble constant of 42 km/sec/megaparsec, but that's an old value.

Ned Wright was always gung-ho for a value of 42, but he's been proven - by his own spacecraft - to be disappointed. The WMAP value is 71+/-3.5.

[Tegan]

ToSeek: Thanks. That may have been it. Damn.

Wingnut Ninja: Yes, that's a little game they play at http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/ (More or less the internet's effort to create an actual Hitchiker's Guide). Everyone who participates is assigned a member (called "researcher") ID. Then, those who get a kick out of such things can figure out how to crunch their ID numbers' digits down to 42. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A530560.

Thanks again :-?