Mindless snacking and energy drinks, dry mouth from dehydration, and teeth grinding while navigating intensive scenarios and tough levels are three of the common risk factors. Playing long into the night spikes inflammatory responses and an increased potential for gum disease.

We already play hard and fast with our dental health in order to play hard and fast – imagine if the whole universe were in fact a game?

Were it one that requires an answer, according to the late, great, baked Douglas Adams, that answer is 42.

Anytime before 1979, being prior to his seminal novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 42 was in theory, a perfectly ordinary number. Although ordinarily, in number theory, it was never a perfect one.

For geeks, and in the absence of Adams, the thrill held by the number 42 was its 4-sequence (42424242) to the 242,422nd decimal point of pi.

However, the kill of that thrill, surely, is that way back in 1761, during the same time that dentists were gaining recognition as specialised surgeons rather than empirical tooth-pullers, Johan Heinrich Lambert proved that pi is irrational; meaning that no matter how many instances there are of people reciting pi to 70,000 or 100,000 decimal places in 9 hours or 16 hours or 17 hours and 14 minutes – it cannot be written in finite decimal notation.

Clearly, that in itself is an irrational undertaking: attempting to prove something that cannot be proven by the method of proof.

Maybe it’s some type of extra nerdy, other worldly philosophic palindrome that actually does prove the point; but only to those well-versed in binary-coded decimal where 0100 0010 is understood to be 42, even though it isn’t.

Is it?

Google Cloud spent three years precisely calculating pi to 100 trillion digits. According to the aforementioned J.H Lambert, that’s a lot to not be possible. His ghostly form would no doubt be most comfortable explaining while wearing a blue diamond-quilted silk satin banyan and an air of certitude.

One supposes that that would qualify as a transcendental experience – discussing mathematics in the year 2024 with an 18th century polymath. That the subject number (42) is also transcendental, makes the entire scenario an extravagantly metaphysical one, with the extent of such deep thought for a centuries-dead philosopher either enticingly inspirational, or wholly nullifying.

It could have Lambert equally wanting to slip into cotillion, or coma.

It is the deep thought of the decades-dead author Douglas Adams that brought us here in the first place: his supercomputer Deep Thought.

To calculate the answer to ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’ Deep Thought took seven-and-a-half million years. Arriving at the number 42, it’s under discussion here for no other reason than absurdity and possibility pretty much make the world go ’round.

Consider the hideous complexity of string theory.

So rich in detail and lavish with probability, it’s the physicist’s infinitely recyclable, completely unsolvable toy. String theory describes every universe except our own, and according to itself, it realistically predicts a multiverse populated by 10500 different ones – none of which can be falsified by any conceivable experiment.

Which is what has string theory perpetually maintained in a state of inertia. Akin to an ill-defined social pressure that’s been around since the late ’60s: much like achieving equality for women. Tens of thousands of white papers, discussions and research hours and still, it remains completely elusive.

Maybe even Schrödinger’s cat-like elusive.

Imagine that premise – a cat, and a whole lotta string. The net result can only be either very sciency; or very, very crazy cat lady.

Especially if there are 42 cats.

Where Douglas Adams consulted, his answer to this would have been, “… since Newton, we had proceeded by the very simple principle that essentially, to see how things work, we took them apart. If you try to take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have in your hands is a non-working cat.”

At least until 2001, when he was unceremoniously kicked off the platform, it’s remarks like this that suggest Adams found the universe to be one big game. The holographic principle sure says it is. Along with resolving the black hole information paradox, the holographic principle states that the three-dimensional world of experience is a hologram: an image coded on a distant two-dimensional surface.

Certainly, the challenge in finding the solutions of string theory in particle physics is a numbers game. That is assuming it’s in there at all; which absolutely cannot be presupposed.

Confused, much?

The long-story-short is that string theory is infinitely full of sprinkle-laden Calabi-Yau doughnuts that you need to check and compare with reality, in the hope of finding a match. Among physicists is the belief that you have to learn how to “game the system” because even the most optimistic of theorists peg the odds of finding a match by blind chance, as incalculably low.

So if that’s not a game, turn me into a boot and give me twenty-five bucks for winning a beauty contest.

Most definitely ‘Donut on a string’ is a game; and one that’s been around long before digital .. well, anything. In that sense, there’s no reason to not loosely consider it the analogue version of string theory.

Manipulating anything to get the outcome you want surely constitutes a game. And why would we think the universe exists for any other reason but for our own fun and amusement? After all, the end result for every single one of us is the same: the only difference is in the timing.

For thousands of years we’ve stared into distant horizons speculating the parameters of reality for trippy theories to emerge. The “simulation hypothesis” is one.

It’s the Shakespeare-on-steroids-engaging-with-AI version of “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players…” Redoubling the idea that the universe is a simulation, Shakespeare’s 1599 existentialist, artistic hunch now has scientific traction. In terms of impetus or outcome, there are prodigious possibilities in a speculative universe.

With that being so, then what’s the objective?

Undoubtedly, it could be altruistic. Anything from collectively being responsible for the continuance of all existence, to spreading consciousness throughout the doughnutty stringiness of sprinkliness we choose to call this game of life.

As to a “what is the meaning of life” question, no matter how many compelling contenders or multi-perspectives there are, the simplest, most cohesive, and eternally unwavering answer, is pure hedonistic pursuit.

It’s a difficult position to argue that personal pleasure has no place in a universe of our own making.

Never play fast and loose with your oral health. There is no reset. Maintaining healthy gums and keeping your teeth is the spectacularly lucky pay-off of never gaming the tried and true system of regular dental appointments and professional oral care.

According to Douglas Adams, he could sit down and put a hundred thousand words in cunning order. On that basis, he can have the last word: “It is often said that a disproportionate obsession with purely academic or abstract matter indicates a retreat from the problems of real life. However, most of the people engaged in such matters say that this attitude is based on three things: ignorance, stupidity, and nothing else.”

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