The answer to life, the universe, and everything = 42 : Why?

the correct answer is indeed 42... or any other number you care to think of.

The issue was not the answer, but the question... as Deep Thought pointed out: the answer is definitely correct, I have checked it very carefully. I think the problem is you don't understand the question..

As Prak, the man who knows all that is true in "Life, the Universe and Everything", points out it is impossible for both The Ultimate Answer and The Ultimate Question to be known about in the same universe (thank you Heisenberg!) as they would cancel each other out and take the Universe with them to be replaced by something even more bizarre and that some think it may have already happened in which case the answer would have to be a different number (or the answer to the previous Ultimate Question was a different number)...

it is actually a nice dig at our tendency to try and describe everything in mathematical terms as if maths is "true". For me "mathematical proof" only proves that mathematics is a beautiful language, capable of capturing the thing it is is "proving", rather than that it proves the thing in itself is "true"..

returning to Douglas Adams in this respect: Marvin the paranoid adroid calculates that 6 by 9 is 42... 54 you say? not in base 13.. which i think rather illustrates my point nicely..

It comes from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The computer, Deep Thought calculates and gets this answer. Somehow the age of the universe.

It has to do with Hubble's constant and law. In the field of astrophysics.