Number 42
This week marks 30 years since the publication of the late, great Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
As many of you might know, the book stipulated the answer to life the universe and everything was... 42.
This little fella was chosen at random.
Adams described the choice as "a completely ordinary number, a number not just divisible by two but also six and seven. In fact it's the sort of number that you could, without any fear, introduce to your parents."
Fair enough. But from my studies now lost in the midst of time I do remember (the only thing I can remember) that the number 42 did pop up from time to time.
So here we go, Weird Science Factoids about the number 42.
It's the angle in degrees for which a rainbow appears.
If you could fall down into the Earth, it would take you 42 minutes to reach the centre.
The Orion Nebula is known as M42.
There are 42 lines on each page of the Gutenberg Bible, also known as the 42-Line Bible.
The world record for the largest number of people crunched into one car is 42.
Napoleon graduated 42nd of 58 in his class at the Military School of Paris.
There are 42 Laws of Cricket.
Wolves and dogs have 42 teeth.
A pair of dice has a total of 42 dots.
There are commonly 42 eyes in a deck of 52 cards
There are 42 territories in the board game Risk.
Elvis was 42 when he died. His father was the same age when he carked it, too.
Weird Science Factoid: Type in "the answer to life the universe and everything' into Google and find the answer yourself.
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Authors
Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
