Very near to Douglas Adams and his "hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy ": this book of the great british number theorist and mathematician G. H. Hardy deals with the distance to alpha centauri, with the end of the universe (however without the idea of a restaurant being there), with the orders of infinity and he even considers the number of molecules of the earth, just like the transistors of a giant computer... erroneously D. Adams didn't recognize the 42! as a factorial but as a 42 with an exclamation mark!

So the answer of all questions –due to the greater mathematician - is/was not 42 but 42!

And we should reconsider the whole story!

Anyway – besides this: D. Adams was surprisingly near the original discovery.