Galaxy Jokes

LONDON (Nov 8, 1996 1:48 p.m. EST) - Scientists searching for one of the fundamental keys to the universe found they had been beaten to the answer by the comic cult novel "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"; and the answer was 42.
In the British novel and radio serial by Douglas Adams, an alien race programs a computer called Deep Thought to provide the ultimate answer to understanding life and the universe.
In the novel, seven and a half million years later Deep Thought comes back with the result - 42.
Astronomers at Britain's Cambridge University took a little less time - three years - to calculate the Hubble Constant that determines the age of the universe. But the answer was the same.
"It caused quite a few laughs when we arrived at the figure 42, because we're all great fans of The Hitchhiker's Guide," Dr. Keith Grange, one of the team of Cambridge scientists who worked on the project, said Friday.
"Everyone thought it was quite more...