Resumo de Life, The Universe And Everything

The Answer to The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is a fictional solution in Douglas Adams's science fiction series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In the story, the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is sought using the hyper computer Deep Thought; however the computer was insufficiently powerful to provide the Ultimate Question when asked after it had produced the Answer. The answer given by Deep Thought prompted the protagonists to embark on a quest to discover the Question to which this is the Answer.Deep Thought informs the researchers that it would design a second and greater computer, incorporating living beings as part of its computational matrix, to tell them what the question is. That computer was called Earth and was so big that it was often mistaken for a planet. The researchers themselves took the apparent form of mice to run the program. The question was lost, five minutes before it was to have been produced, due to the Vogons' demolition of the Earth, supposedly to build a hyperspace bypass. Later in the series, it is revealed that the Vogons had been hired to destroy the Earth by a consortium of philosophers and psychiatrists who feared for the loss of their jobs when the meaning of Life became common knowledge.At the end of Mostly Harmless, which is the last of the series of novels, there is a final reference to the number 42. As Arthur and Ford are dropped off at club Beta, Ford shouts at the cabby to stop "just there, number forty-two ? Right here!" The entire Earth in all dimensions, not just those in which it was demolished by the Vogons, is destroyed immediately after this final reference, which could lead to the Ultimate Question being, "Where does it all end?"A joke about the impossibility of understanding the real meaning of the universe first appeared in Fit the Seventh of the radio series, in 1978. There it was stated: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 more bizarrely inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. The joke was reprinted in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and re-worked into both Life, the Universe and Everything and The Tertiary Phase, based on the third novel. In the latter novel, Arthur encounters a man named Prak, who through a significant overdose of a remarkably effective truth serum has gained the knowledge of all truth. Prak confirms that 42 is indeed the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, but reveals that it is impossible for both the Ultimate Answer and the Ultimate Question to be known about in the same universe a sort of way to keep the key from the lock. He states that if such a thing should come to pass, the universe would disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable. He then speculates that this may have already happened.The mutual exclusion of knowing both the Ultimate Question and the Ultimate Answer mimics counter-intuitive principles of quantum mechanics like the Pauli exclusion principle and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.Douglas Adams was asked many times during his career why he chose the number forty-two. Many theories were proposed, but he rejected them all. On November 3, 1993, he gave an answer on alt.fan.douglas-adams:The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. End of story. While it is certainly true that the answer was intended to be just a number with no hidden meaning, the fact that he arrived at 42 was explained in more detail in an interview with Ian Johnstone of BBC Radio 4 recorded in 1998 though never broadcast to cate the 20th anniversary of the first radio broadcast of The Hitchhiker's Guide.In the interview Adams said that, having decided it should be a number, he tried to think what an "ordinary number" should be. Adams ruled out non-integers, and then he remembered having worked as a "prop-borrower" for John Cleese on his Video Arts training videos. Cleese needed a funny number that would serve as the punch line to a long sketch involving himself as a bank teller and Tim Brooke-Taylor as a customer. Adams believed that number that Cleese came up with was 42 and he decided to use it.Several attempts by fans to find this particular video have been unsuccessful and it is possible it may never have been published or has since been deleted from use.This interview is contained on Douglas Adams's Guide to the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy BBC Cassette ISBN 0-563-55236-0) and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - The Collectors Edition BBC CD ISBN 0-563-47702-4For details refer: http://www.amazon.com/Life-Universe-Everything-Douglas-Adams/dp/0345418905

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