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As we remember, wanting to get an answer to the most important question of life, the universe and everything else, the creators of the computer “Deep Thought” forgot to formulate this question itself. In order to learn it, the greatest of the universe's supercomputers, Earth, was created. In the subsequent novels of Adams ' delightful series, the question is never found-if only because at the beginning of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Earth is destroyed by the Vogons.�
Despite many attempts by fans to understand what exactly is missing, we don't know. Maybe we don't need to know, otherwise the Earth will have nothing to do and you never know what will happen. Adams himself replied that he was just fucking joking and that was the first thing that came to mind.
More sense is invested in the story of how they tried to get this answer. And what they did after receiving it. I think that the author has written an amazing book with an original and witty humor. But through this humor and absurdity, he conveyed the deepest ideas about enjoying the present day and not looking for an answer that will answer everything and everyone. This is the utopia of perfectionist philosophers. After all, 42 did not suit anyone. They came up with a legend after, thought out the show – this is the author's answer to the Main Question of life, the universe and all that, that's what humanity needs.
And why is it a number, and not a set of letters or some strange word? Here, I think, he showed that machines are not capable of solving the problems of humanity. And through the mice, he showed that the truth about our destiny can be disappointing. Therefore, it is better to buy nuts in a bar 5 minutes before the end of the world than to try to realize something great.
Very good answers, but I'll try to formulate my own.
42 is an extremely disappointing answer to the main question of the universe, life and all that. The fact is that reality does not have to fit into an ideal mathematical model. And it doesn't seem to fit.I'll just cautiously share my thoughts.
In his wonderful and very popular book ” Space Landscape. String theory and the illusion of intelligent design of the Universe”, Leonard Susskind consistently sets out the main milestones in human understanding of the structure of the world up to the most recent concepts of the structure of the Universe. In one of the first chapters, we talk about the “Mother of all Physical Problems” – it consists in the fact that one of the most important fundamental coupling constants – the cosmological constant has a completely different value than that derived in the Standard Model and in General relativity. And the error is not just monstrous, it is absurd-120 orders of magnitude. 120! This number is so large that it is twenty orders of magnitude larger than the Googol number. Or it is such a large number that it is 39-41 orders of magnitude larger than the number of atoms in the visible part of the universe. Moreover, the accuracy with which it was estimated is quite high, and if it were at least 1-2 orders of magnitude larger or smaller, then the universe would either not have had time to develop to the age of 1.4*10^10 years and would have collapsed, or all the particles that make up galaxies, nebulae, stars and all matter would have long since scattered.�
To put it in simpler terms and summarize what has already been said, reality does not fit into an elegant mathematical/physical model, but on the contrary, “mocking” curious people, it turns out to be what it is. This is the great sorrow for the illusory grace of the laws of nature. This is directly related to the absurdity of the answer “42”. And even if the author just wanted to make a joke, it is possible that he did not intentionally hit the nail on the head.�
42 is an absurd, frustrating, completely meaningless answer to the greatest question. In my opinion, it is precisely such feelings that theoretical physicists and experimentalists have, the fact that the Laws of Nature are not elegant, do not fit into a Universal Theory, but are somehow finely tuned, assembled exactly so that the universe could exist and we could appear in it.�
PS The anthropic principle is a very controversial concept in the recent past, and many scientists with strict views on physical problems are equated with almost-creationism.
Purely because this is the answer to the Main Question about Life, the Universe and so on. Naturally, then the story shows us one rather simple truth: “to find out the right answers, you need to ask the right questions.”