What's this business with "42"?

Question:

What's this business with "42"?

I asked someone what the Meaning of Life is, and he said 'forty-two'. This has happened with three separate people and I don't know why.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Douglas Adams wrote a book called The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In that book, a race of pandimensional beings (posing as white laboratory mice, but that's another story) built a gigantic computer named Deep Thought, so smart that even before its gigantic data banks were connected, it started from "I think therefore I am" and got as far as deducing the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off.
They asked the computer for the Answer.
"The answer to what?", asked Deep Thought.
"Life! The Universe! Everything!" they said.

After calculating for seven million years, it told them that the Answer was "Forty-two"... so they had to build an even larger computer to find out what the Question was.

A helpful Guest pointed out that "42" turned upside down is "2b", or "to be". Dollars to donuts that never even occurred to Douglas Adams. Weird Universe, ain't it?