The Reason for the answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe and Everything.

a reply to: Peeple

Yeah we can all read wikipedia.
And you are right he was a hardened athiest.
As am I. But despite that being the case DA was quite knowledgeable about the bible and ancient history, and had an understanding of a form of numerology which probably occasioned his statements about a whole string of pretty meaningless coincidences.
It seems jumping the gun is a sport on the forums. You should try sword dancing.

a reply to: Slartibartfaster

I really could have used jesus as a math tutor in school.

a reply to: solargeddon

No, there was no divine hand at work.
If I thought that I'd have put this thread where the creationists live.
The hand was astronomical.
Though as a reference to Peeples numerology comment.
If you number all the letters of the english alphabet from 1 to 26 and remove all ones and zeros, you are left with a series of digits.
If that was done to the word divine and the single digits were multiplied together, it would give the result 25920.
A year of precession, a divine number.
Perhaps Peeple could apply that system to the the word Reason which DA capitalized in the book, Life the Universe and Everything. Prak explained the story of the Reason to Arthur Dent, but I suspect Peeple could't get to grips with that, man.

a reply to: Slartibartfaster

Why don't you just tell us what you think the reason is and we discuss that?
Because so far all I've seen is you trying to appear more interesting than you are.

a reply to: Idreamofme

Nah,
Jesus wouldn't have helped.
Christ on the other hand might have been useful.
I noted a way of converting words to numbers in a previous post.
If you applied that to Christ, you would get a number 31104 which if you add a bunch of zeroes to it, gives the lifetime of Brahma, the head of the Indian Trimurti of Creator Deities.
Doing the number to Brahma gives 384, the trinity number 3 in association with the orbit of the planet Uranus.
I'm not calling you one of them, but there are some foolish folk responding to my posts.
Perhaps they think I am trying to push some religious agenda in the science forums.
Far from it.
Plato said 'Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.'
I don't regard myself as a wise man at all. But I have spent nearly 5 years exploring this subject and it seems to me that those ancient folk knew far more about the heavens than we give them credit for, though their understanding related that knowledge to deities.

a reply to: Slartibartfaster

Yet none of your little number games let to 42 so far. You know that's the topic of your thread, right?

a reply to: Peeple

Well the Reason is that the word Reason has a value of 7200.
The zeroes can be used, or not.
But the crux is that throughout the HHGG the numbers 72 and 84 are tucked away, and the reason for that is that Douglas Adams knew that both numbers were immensely important in the ancient world.
Any understanding of ancient Egypt would show you how important the number 42, and hence 84 was to them. I'm not going into that. Nor am I going into where in the bible these numbers are hidden away.
The precessional number 72 also falls into that category. It was known far earlier than Hipparchus, and is intimately connected with the number 84 in the bible and many other places.
If you knew where and how these are hidden you might think differently.
But if you had spent 5 years researching a project I doubt you would want to give it all away either.

a reply to: Peeple

At the beginning of the thread it was shown that half of the orbit of the planet Uranus is the source of the number 42.

a reply to: Slartibartfaster

Wow you wasted 5 years on this?
That's absolutely nothing!

The number 42 wasn't important to them it just happened that the law of the ma'at consists of 42 commandments.

And again why would a writer, a known atheist and defender of reason use that for his book?
Because you seem to project and awful lot of your own superstitions on that "tucked away" stuff no one but you can find in the story.

By that logic: he never mentions grapefruits, it's tucked away in the part where he describes what tea is, because our meat consumption is the main reason for global warming.
That makes just as much sense & took me less than 2 minutes...

5years for this?! You poor thing

It's because 42 minutes. Why Uranus? Is it also tucked away somewhere?

To finish up I'll give a couple of examples from my book relating to these numbers appearing in the HHGG.

'In the second book, the crew went to dinner at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Zaphod Beeblebrox ordered 'Four rare steaks please, and hurry. We haven't eaten in five hundred and seventy-six thousand million years.'

4x5x7x6 = 840'

'On page 112 of the book 'The Restaurant at the End of the Universe', there is talk about the actual Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the one with the words 'Don't Panic' on the cover. The most successful book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor.
The statistics relating to the geo-social nature of the Universe are deftly set out between the pages, 938324 and 938326.

9x3x8x3x2x4 = 5184
9x3x8x3x2x6 = 7776

7776-5184 = 2592.'

Which adding a zero is a year of precession.
360 days of 72 years.

I'm not interested in being insulted so I'll leave it there.
So long, and if you haven't noticed, you're running out of fish.

a reply to: Slartibartfaster

I hope you take in to consideration the fact that the answer, 42, after 7.5 million years of calculation, was a mistake. The question to the ultimate answer was, "What do you get when you multiply 6 x 9?" The real answer is 54.

a reply to: solargeddon

OMG, I've fallen into the ATS black hole, just like I did at the Nyx make up counter yesterday.

Tell me about this trip to the NYX makeup counter.... been wanting to try on everything of their products that I can't find locally.

originally posted by: solargeddon
a reply to: Slartibartfaster

84 earth years, which is double 42.

And it is actually 84.02xxx years, half of which is 42.01xxx.

So, not really double 42.

a reply to: Slartibartfaster

Asking people to participate by asking you questions, and then berating most of them that participate isn't really a good way to start or maintain a discussion. Just saying. Insulting peoples intelligence doesn't inflate your own man. I don't know how you start a silly topic and then get all butt hurt when people don't want to play the silly game.

42 is the precise number if pints of stout one must imbibe to achieve Supreme Enlightenment.

a reply to: Slartibartfaster
Well for a start your first question. Why or better still how do you come to the figure 20 Astronomical units. Where does the 20 come into 42. It's a figure you started with to justify your after conclusions for 42.
What you really must do is ask Douglas Adams how HE came up with 42.
As far as I know Adams never gave any reason for the figure, accept it's the atomic number for Molybdenum and Adams might have liked the sound of Molybdenum.