Reality Amuck™

Happy Towel Day!

In celebration of Towel Day, and in memory of Mr. Douglas Adams, I have compiled a list of forty-two facts about 42. I have tried to use as many pre-Hitchhiker’s Guide references as possible and relied heavily on Wikipedia as a sole-source as every good internet researcher should.

1. It is the jersey number of Jackie Robinson, and the only number retired by all Major League Baseball teams.
2. There are 42 laws of cricket.
3. It was the jersey number of Pat Tillman.
4. In Judaism there is a Forty-Two Lettered Name given to God and it is only entrusted to “him who is pious, meek, middle-aged, free from bad temper, sober, and not insistent on his rights”.
5. In Christianity, there are 42 Generations listed in the Gospel of Matthew’s version of the Genealogy of Jesus.
6. In the book of Revelations it is prophesied that the “Beast” will hold dominion over the Earth for 42 months.
7. The angle at which light reflects off water to create a rainbow is 42 degrees.
8. Two physical constants in the universe are the speed of light and the diameter of a proton. It takes light 10 to the minus 42nd power seconds to travel across the diameter of a proton.
9. The atomic number of molybdenum is 42.
10. In 1965, mathematician Paul Cooper theorized that the fastest, most efficient way to travel across continents would be to bore a straight hollow tube directly through the Earth, connecting a set of antipodes, evacuate it (remove the air), and then just fall through. The first half of the journey consists of free-fall acceleration, while the second half consists of an exactly equal deceleration. The time for such a journey works out to be 42 minutes. Remarkably, even if the tube does not pass through the exact center of the Earth, the time for a journey powered entirely by gravity always works out to be 42 minutes, as long as the tube remains friction-free, as while gravity's force would be lessened, so would the distance traveled at an equal rate. The same idea was proposed by Lewis Carroll in “Sylvie and Bruno”, volume 2, chapter 7, without calculation.
11. The perfect score on the USA Math Olympiad and International Mathematical Olympiad is 42.
12. The eight digits of pi beginning from 242,422 places after the decimal point are 42424242.
13. According to Kabalistic tradition “42” is the number with which God creates the universe.
14. Given 27 same-size cubes whose nominal values progress from 1 to 27, a 3×3×3 "magic cube" can be constructed such that every row, column, and corridor, and every diagonal passing through the center, comprises 3 cubes whose sum of values is 42.
15. The original printing of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” contained 42 illustrations.
16. The first book to be printed with movable type, the Gutenberg Bible, is also known as the “42-Line Bible” as each page contains 42 lines of print.
17. A “40 Gallon” barrel of crude oil contains 42 gallons.
18. Elvis Presely died at age 42.
19. In a standard deck of cards there are 42 eyes.
20. In Super Bowl XLII (42) the New York Giants, in one of the most significant upsets in Super Bowl history, defeated the New England Patriots, becoming the first NFC wild card team to win a Super Bowl.
21. William Jefferson Clinton was the 42nd President of the United States, but George W. Bush was the 42nd person to hold the office.
22. Famed actress Glenn Close can fit 42 baby carrots in her mouth at the same time.
23. The 42nd episode of the original Star Trek series to be broadcast was titled “Obsession”.
24. February 11th is the 42nd day of the year. It was on this day in 1794 that the first time a session of the United States Senate was opened to the public.
25. There are 42 possible positions in the game “Connect Four”
26. In “Romeo and Juliet”, Juliet was to drink a potion which would make her appear dead for 42 hours.
27. Approximately every 42 months there is a solar eclipse.
28. Michael J. Fox’s character in “Teen Wolf” wears jersey number 42.
29. 042 occurs at the digit stream ending at the 50 billionth decimal place in each of pi and 1/pi.
30. In the TIFF image file format, the second 16-bit word of every file is 42, which is used together with the first word to indicate byte order.
31. In the reiser4 file system, 42 is the inode number of the root directory.
32. In the ASCII character code and other codes based on it, 42 represents the asterisk character (*).
33. In the GNU C Library, a set of standard routines available for use in computer programing, contains a function--memfrob() --which performs an XOR combination of a given variable and the binary pattern 00101010 (42) as an XOR cipher.
34. I really couldn’t find forty-two things, so I just gave up at 34.