Douglas got it wrong, the answer isn't 42 it's 37

decrepit said..
This looks very interesting

newscientist.com said..
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A cosmologist and astrobiologist at the Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Makukov says the numbers reveal that all terrestrial life came from outer space. Not only that, it was planted on Earth by intelligent aliens. Billions of years ago, the planet was barren and lifeless. But then, at some distant and unknowable moment, it was seeded with what Makukov calls an "intelligent-like signal" – a signal that is too orderly and intricate to have occurred randomly.
This signal, he says, is in our genetic code. Highly preserved across cosmological timescales, it has been waiting there, like an encrypted message, for anyone qualified to read it. All of the teeming varieties of life on Earth – from kangaroos and daffodils to albatrosses and us – carry it within them. And now Makukov, along with his mentor, mathematician Vladmir shCherbak of the al-Farabi Kazakh National University in Almaty, claims to have cracked it. If they are right, the answer to life, the universe and everything is... 37.

To test the idea, Makukov and shCherbak devised a mathematical approach to analyse the code, searching for patterns unlikely to occur at random. Their arguments are often dense and impenetrable, filled with complex mathematical formulae. But at heart, Makukov says, "it's very simple". The genetic code is like some type of combinatorial puzzle, he says. In other words, once you begin to analyse it, hidden regularities emerge. "It was clear right away that the code has a non-random structure," says Makukov. "The patterns that we describe are not simply non-random. They have some features that, at least from our point of view, were very hard to ascribe to natural processes." Exhibit A is Rumer's transformation. In 1966, Soviet mathematician Yuri Rumer pointed out that the genetic code can be divided neatly in half (see "Rumer's transformation"). One half is the "whole family" codons, in which all four codons with the same two initial letters code for the same amino acid. The AC family, for instance, is "whole" because codons beginning AC code for threonine. On the other are "split family" codons, which don't have this property. Rumer first noted that there is no good reason why exactly half of the codons should be whole. More profoundly, he also realised that applying a simple rule – swapping T for G, and A for C – converts one half of the code into the other. That might sound inevitable, but it is not. In 1996, mathematician Olga Zhaksybayeva of the al-Farabi Kazakh National University calculated that the probability of it occurring by chance is 3.09 × 10-32. And Rumer's transformation is just one of many patterns and symmetries within the code. Another example: you can create a subset of codons including those with three identical bases (AAA, say) and those with three unique bases (GTC, say). Using a Rumer-type transformation, these 28 codons can be divided into two groups each with a combined total atomic mass of 1665, and a combined "side chain" atomic mass of 703 (see "Transformation #2"). Both are multiples of the prime number 37, which has interesting mathematical properties of its own (see "Symmetries of 37").

TheSailingMoose said..
the ultimate answer might be 42 but the tricky part is working out what the question is in the first place :P

decrepit said...


Actually that's the easy one.

What's 6 X 7?