42
answer to life, the universe and everything (W3)
In dem Werk "The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" dt. "Per Anhalter durch die Galaxis" von "Douglas Adams" war 42 die Lösung für alle Probleme. Seitdem ist diese Zahl Anlass für weitere Begriffsbildungen und Diskussionen.
(E?)(L?) http://www.google.de/search?q=answer+to+life%2C+the+universe+and+everything&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=de&meta=
Google kennt auch die Antwort auf das Leben, das Universum und überhaupt auf alles.
answer to life, the universe and everything = "42".
(E3)(L1) http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/
When one wishes to specify a large but random number of things, and the context is inappropriate for N, certain numbers are preferred by hacker tradition (that is, easily recognized as placeholders). These include the following:
- 17 - Long described at MIT as "the least random number"; see 23.
- 23 - "Sacred number of Eris", "Goddess of Discord" (along with 17 and 5).
- 42 - The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything ("what is 6 times 9", correct in base 13). (Note that this answer is completely fortuitous. :-))
- 69 - From the sexual act. This one was favored in MIT's ITS culture.
- 105 - 69 hex = 105 decimal, and 69 decimal = 105 octal.
(E?)(L?) http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Answer_to_Life,_the_Universe,_and_Everything
"42" is the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, as given by the supercomputer Deep Thought to a group of mice in "Douglas Adams's" comic science fiction series "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". According to the Guide, mice are 3-dimensional profiles of a pan-dimensional, super-intelligent race of beings. They built Deep Thought, the second greatest computer of all time and space, to tell them the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything. After seven and a half million years the computer divulges the answer: "42".
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(E?)(L?) http://h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/A943184
A History of 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'
(E?)(L?) http://h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/A5815
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
(E?)(L?) http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0709/0709.4024v1.pdf
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What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything? In the sci-fi spoof The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the answer was found to be 42; the hardest part turned out to be finding the real question. Indeed, although our inquisitive ancestors undoubtedly asked such big questions, their search for a “theory of everything” evolved as their knowledge grew. As the ancient Greeks replaced myth-based explanations with mechanistic models of the solar system, their emphasis shifted from asking “why” to asking “how”.
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(E?)(L?) http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0704/0704.0646v1.pdf
The Mathematical Universe
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I. INTRODUCTION
The idea that our universe is in some sense mathematical goes back to the Pythagoreans, and has been extensively discussed in the literature. Galileo Galilei stated that the Universe is a grand book written in the language of mathematics, and Wigner reflected on the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences”. In this essay, I will push this idea to its extreme and argue that our universe is mathematics in a well-defined sense. After elaborating on this hypothesis and underlying assumptions in Section II, I discuss a variety of its implications in Sections III-VII. This paper can be thought of as the sequel to one I wrote in 1996, clarifying and extending the ideas described therein.
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