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Books Idle Science

Douglas Adams was Right. Science Journal Proves 42 Is the Address of the Universe 98

Posted by EditorDavid from the and-thanks-for-all-the-fish dept.
A Slashdot reader writes: First published in Jan. '21, a new publication entitled Measurement Quantization affirms the #42 is the address of our universe (Appx. AC), a distinguishing feature of our construct that ultimately answers the question to life, the universe and everything – from a physicist's point-of-view. Importantly, the International Journal of Geometric Methods in Modern Physics – is a top-tier journal indexed to NASA's Astronomical Data System (ADS), the after peer review version of arXiv.org.

With just over 500 equations, the paper resolves a comprehensive physical description of dark energy, dark matter, discrete gravity, and unification. Resolving over 30 outstanding problems in modern physics, the paper derives the physical constants from first principles, demonstrates the physical significance of Planck's units, resolves discrete versions of SR and GR, derives the equivalence principle, presents a parameter free description of early universe events, discovers a new form of length contraction not related to Einstein's relativity and identifies the discrete state of our universe – 42. Forty-two is what defines our universe from any other version of a universe. It also determines the rate of expansion and the ground state orbital of an atom, thus reducing the number of stable universes as we understand them to just a few.

So, while Douglas Adams may have just been randomly picking numbers when writing Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, perhaps we also live in a universe that likes to humor itself.
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Douglas Adams was Right. Science Journal Proves 42 Is the Address of the Universe More

Douglas Adams was Right. Science Journal Proves 42 Is the Address of the Universe

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  • Ob HHGTTG Quote (Score:5, Funny)

    by Nighttime ( 231023 ) on Sunday November 13, 2022 @06:09PM (#63048847) Homepage Journal

    "There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory mentioned, which states that this has already happened."

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      I think the real revelation here is that as in the book all great information comes from the side of a cereal box. And according to the comments this journal is equivalent to the side of a cereal box.

      I think /. has gotten pranked with extreme jargon. And there is no excuse as multiple posts have been dedicated to pranking scientific articles

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by thomn8r ( 635504 )

      "There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory mentioned, which states that this has already happened."

      Now there's a hoopy frood who really knows where his towel's at!

  • Simulation (Score:3)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Sunday November 13, 2022 @06:11PM (#63048859)

    Adams was really a program which inadvertently accessed an already addressed memory space and got the answer that way. He said he picked the number at random, but the reality is he saw behind the curtain but didn't realize what he saw.

    It's the only explanation and clearly shows we live in a simulation.

    • There's another explanation (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Beryllium Sphere(tm) ( 193358 ) on Sunday November 13, 2022 @06:34PM (#63048901) Journal

      I felt clever coming up with this but Google said others beat me to it.

      The white mice just had a mild hearing impairment and didn't realize that Deep Thought had quite sensibly told them that the ultimate answer to life was "fortitude".

      • It’s also funny that 6 x 9 is 42 in base 13.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DaHat ( 247651 )

        it's late, I'm tired, and may have had a couple of drinks, and as I read your reply, I kept pausing mid-way through, thinking "Donald Trump said what?!?" ... apparently I can't read tonight and all DT's read the same at first glance.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MrKaos ( 858439 )

      the reality is he saw behind the curtain but didn't realize what he saw.

      Alternatively, reality used Adams for comedic self expression.

  • Alright science pack it up (Score:5, Funny)

    by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Sunday November 13, 2022 @06:15PM (#63048863)
    We did, we solved science! Good job everyone, but sadly this means there will be redundancies in everything from physics to philosophy to teaching. From now on all schooling will be replaced with a giant poster that says "42" on it. So teachers you're going to have to find new jobs as well. Fortunately accounting is now easy, we must simply type in "42" and everything becomes correct!

  • Self fulfilling prophecy? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by daten ( 575013 ) on Sunday November 13, 2022 @06:16PM (#63048867)
    The conclusions appear to be summarized by the tables on page 31 in the manuscript. I'm not enough of a mathematician to fairly evaluate the paper but my gut feeling in situations like this is that the researchers *want* the answer to be 42 and that biases their work. It also appears that Nlr = 61 was a stronger match but implicitly didn't conform to all the criteria.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • I definitely didn't understand it, even despite actually having experience in launching satellites, building cars, computers and websites. Thanks for the detailed response though.
      • Did you analyse your results with the Rockwell Retro Encabulator? As you can see the ion profraction of the barometric andulator follows the channel, and condenses into these cortozoic fibers.
        • Slight correction: the retro encabulator had bugs (crooked bovoid slots), use the original turbo encabulator and you get the correct number, which is 3. Here's why: "The latter consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marzlevanes, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar waneshaft that side fumbling was effectively prevented. The main winding was of the normal lotus-o-delta type placed in panendermic semi-bovoid slots in the stator, every seventh conductor being connected by a non-reversible tremie pipe to the differe

      • I had never read the book or seen the movie.

        It was a radio series. Everything else came after.

  • He specifically chose 42 because it's what "you get when you multiply six by nine."

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by vivian ( 156520 )

      Obviously he was working in base 13, ergo proving that he really was an alien, that just had the extra fingers removed to blend in with humans.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Jimekai ( 938123 )
        Base 2 values from Planck's unit 1 to 0 extends in 3 dimensions as 101010, which is 42 in base 10. Given the fact that each time and electron moves it copies itself through time with the original passing into the past as dark matter to become dark energy and thence into anti-matter in one of the few other universes traveling backwards in time.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Maybe it's just me, but doesn't it seem suspicious that this "[resolves] over 30 outstanding problems in modern physics", including "a comprehensive physical description of dark energy, dark matter, discrete gravity, and unification"? Either this is the breakthrough of the century or it's a load of hogwash (or the summary is worse than usual). I know what I'm betting on, and it's not that physics was solved 18 months ago.

  • Douglas Adams clearly didn't realize what he knew. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by VanGarrett ( 1269030 ) on Sunday November 13, 2022 @06:29PM (#63048889)

    What really gets me, is that an author choosing a number based on arbitrary qualities to make a funny joke, just happening to choose the answer that turns out to be correct and meaningful, is something that would absolutely fit snugly into the world that Douglas Adams was writing about.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • What could this person possibly have done to warrant comment removal and account deletion? They can only put words here. What thoughts are so vile and prohibited that I am not even permitted to see them even while browsing at -1?

  • I would have gone with 1/137 actually (Score:3)

    by budgenator ( 254554 ) on Sunday November 13, 2022 @06:37PM (#63048905) Journal

    Or 1/137.035999084 [bigthink.com] to be more precise; it's cool because it's a naked number so it doesn't matter if your metric, imperial or what ever some space aliens use, the number is the same. Any culture with sufficiently advanced physics knows the number and probably thinks "Well that's sure is weird".

  • That's not a real scientific journal. (Score:5, Informative)

    by students ( 763488 ) on Sunday November 13, 2022 @06:40PM (#63048911) Journal

    I peer review for multiple well known physics journals. Any decent physicist would know that "World Scientific" is a terrible publisher and none of their journals are "top tier."

    • The author of this paper has published just a few papers. All the ones I saw were in low quality journals. The author has posted a massive number of preprints, possibly in an effort to make their work appear popular using hundreds of self-citations.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by znrt ( 2424692 )

        you guys must be fun at parties ...

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          Shitting up the scientific record is not fun, party or not. Shitting up the scientific record by giving thousands of dollars to scammers who operate by shitting up the scientific record is even less fun.

          Do like the classic crazies do and put up a weirdly formatted web page advertising your time cube electric universe hot grits theory, post it on Slashdot, and then we'll all have fun making fun of it.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Jimekai ( 938123 )
            42 represents the outer limits of a binary 101010 time cube of Planck units that's transparent to quarks. I conjecture the fact that each time a normalized electron spirals, in keeping with the first law of thermodynamics, it would have to split both ways going through time with an original passing into the past as dark matter to become dark energy and thence into anti-matter in one of the few other universes brushing passed us in an exactly reversed time, neither faster or slower.

          • It's a little fun. The only reason it's not a lot of fun is because it wasn't clever enough.

    • It is a joke. Humor. Sigh....

    • This is clearly a joke.

      • The story-submitter, who I suspect is also the paper's author, doesn't appear to be laughing. See the posts below in this thread.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Impact Factor (Score:4)

      by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Sunday November 13, 2022 @10:30PM (#63049301) Journal
      That was my immediate impression too. I've never heard of the journal and it has an impact factor of 1.875 which is far below "top-tier" status. In fact, I'd rate it as bottom-tier. The fact that the paper claims to resolve "a comprehensive physical description of dark energy, dark matter..." also raises red flags since we have zero clue about the nature of dark matter or dark energy so there is no way for them to come up with an accurate physical description of them.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        That's not quite fair. We have LOTS of clues about dark energy and dark matter. Nobody's been able to resolve them into anything defensible, but there's plenty for the basis of lots of theories.

        • That's not quite fair. We have LOTS of clues about dark energy and dark matter.

          Sorry, but that's entirely wrong. The only things we think we know about Dark Matter is that it has a gravitational field and does not interact with EM waves. That's literally it. We have no clue whether it interacts through the weak force or the Higgs, whether it is light, low mass particles or high mass particles. Is it axions, WIMPs, a hidden dark sector or something else entirely? Indeed, it might not even be subatomic particles at all but actually Black Holes. Dark Energy is even more mysterious.

          Ye

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by HiThere ( 15173 )

            You can say that, and at a gross level you'll be correct. But there's also things like "these two galaxies collided, and the dark matter kept going". (Well, maybe. That's one interpretation of the evidence.) There's evidence against the hot-light dark matter theories. There's lots of different pieces of evidence, and every theory needs to fit against all of them, even if only by explaining why they aren't significant.

            • But there's also things like "these two galaxies collided, and the dark matter kept going"

              Yes, the Bullet cluster - it was actually two galactic clusters. However, all that tells you is that the cross-section for DM-DM collisions is much less than for ordinary matter collisions it does not give you any information about what that interaction is. Hot dark matter is largely ruled out by the cosmic microwave background but you can still have cold light dark matter - light dark matter is not automatically hot because it depends on the production mechanism in the early universe which itself depends

      • Yeah this sets off alarm bells. I used to moderate Quoras Physics space, and believe me that cursed website has an entire army of "I disproved einstein and wrote a website about it guys". One guy had some "Hypergeometric theory" that solved all physics, another guy just ranted endlessly about how gravity is "superfluid dark matter", one dude , well I'm not sure what his deal was but he was obsessed with einsteins IQ, oh and there was the guy who posited that heaven and the power of jesus is what provided th

  • The answer 42 only works in base 13
    So Douglas Adams' 42 is not the same as our 42
    And God has 13 fingers

    • Real men count from zero.

    • Just do the math in reverse. If 6x9=42 then divide out then from both sides and 9=7.
      This makes sense in any base. You don't need to do some whacky base 13 thing.

      You know how we know it's true? Easy. Because when we multiply both sides by 6 as per the Earth Computer and Deep Thought, we get 42. 6x9=42.

      It all makes sense. No funky math required.

  • Correction -- need a rewrite (Score:5, Informative)

    by AlanObject ( 3603453 ) on Sunday November 13, 2022 @07:06PM (#63048945)

    It has been decades since I read the book but if memory serves the answer to the universe is 42. Not the address.

    And, of course, the question remains unknown.

    • You need to catch up on a few more books.

    • And, of course, the question remains unknown.

      I seem to recall that the question is "what is 6 times 9?"

    • I thought thgttg series made it clear that the question was "what is 6 multiplied by 9?"

    • It has been decades since I read the book but if memory serves the answer to the universe is 42. Not the address.

      And, of course, the question remains unknown.

      Yep, you are correct, it is the answer. If it turned out to also be the address (whatever that means) that would be a fun coincidence, but probably not much more than that. Similarly, apparently 42 was chosen as in ASCII that would be the * character, aka a wildcard, aka the answer to life the universe and everything is whatever you want it to be. I'm not sure if Douglas Adams truly intended that or if it's just another nice coincidence, but overall what could be more Douglas Adams-esque than a large series

  • Adams didn't pick 42 at random. It is ASCII. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by OriolFM ( 6211772 ) on Monday November 14, 2022 @02:03AM (#63049521) Homepage
    I've seen many comments joking about base 13 and multiplication, but that's not the explanation. Adams picked 42 willingly: it is ASCII code.

    42 (decimal) is the ASCII code for the character '*'.
    As anyone in this website probably knows, '*' is one of the most commonly used wildcards representing any character or string.
    So, of course, the answer to anything is always *, because * can mean anything as well.
    • Adams repeatedly stated it's completely random, and has no meaning whatsoever. The only thought process was it had to be a number, and a meaningless number at that. The entire joke relies on it not making any sense no matter how hard you try. Just a plain old number. Fans like you insist he's lying, and quite dead anyway, so who cares what his opinions are, right?
      • According to several people I know, Adams discussed that thing about ASCII at some convention in Europe (Spain, I think, but I'm not too sure, it's been years since I heard the story). Even if it's not true, the ASCII answer makes perfect sense.
  • Actually it is 42.300272850241 :)

  • Isn't the question "what you get when you multiply nine by six"?

    Which is 42 (base13)?

    Of course, Douglas Adams did say no one makes jokes in base-13, but who knows...

  • That there are an infinite number of possible universes between universe 42 and universe 43?

  • Adams did not select 42 randomly. It was the answer to the ultimate question, and that question was what the Earth, a giant supercomputer, had been created to determine. In one version of the story, I believe the television series, That question was finally revealed: "What is the product of 6 and 9?" I thought it was hilarious.
  • 42 was the answer to "life, the universe, and everything". Adams said it was a joke. Adams's jokes were funny back when I was a heavy pot-smoker. Now I am just heavy.

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