The number 42, The Color Red, and X-Ray Vision

The number 42 has its place in the Beyond the Map’s Edge treasure hunt. It is marked on the taillight of Justin’s truck in a scene from Gold & Greed, and it is one of the numbers that are clearly identified and appears to serve a purpose. It is a number with little to no doubt it belongs. It represents something.

The question is what.

Theories in the hunting community tend to revolve heavily around rainbows and the meaning of life. While I do subscribe to both the rainbow theory and the meaning-of-life theory, I keep them on the lowest paid plan with ads.

Before continuing to read on, understand this post is more of a nerd dive into something that I am over analyzing on purpose. My intention is not poke holes and be the guy that argues over semantics. I want to address something that may or may not have a connection to the scene in the show where Justin is explaining x-ray vision (spoiler alert).

Continuing, I want to talk a bit about the number 42 and rainbows, because I love the idea of a rainbow connection. But I also think the 42-degree idea may be applied too broadly and can be misleading, even if it still points in a similar direction.

For a deeper precursor, I highly recommend watching What They (Probably) Don’t Teach You About Rainbows At School. It was a great primer to understanding the whole concept a little better. If anything, you can sound like the smart friend while on a hike using what many would consider useless knowledge. Unless you use it to find a treasure, then you will be a genius.

A primary rainbow forms through sunlight entering water droplets, refracting, reflecting once inside the droplet, and then refracting again as it exits. Because different wavelengths of light bend by slightly different amounts, the colors emerge at slightly different viewing angles. Red light appears near the outer edge of a primary rainbow at roughly 42 degrees from the antisolar point.

As the angle increases or decreases, eventually light enters a spectrum where there is still color, but our human eyes can not see it. If you could, you would essentially have X-ray vision or potentially be having the most intense hallucination, rivalling only your college days. In other words, 42 degrees is not the whole rainbow. It is closer to the red edge of the primary rainbow.

The rainbow itself is a continuous spectrum. There are no hard borders between red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and violet. Those are human categories placed onto a smooth gradient of visible light. The colors blend into one another, even though our eyes and brains tend to divide them into separate bands.

That distinction matters. Saying “a rainbow is 42 degrees” is not exactly wrong in casual conversation, but it is incomplete. More precisely, the primary rainbow occupies a small range of angles, with red appearing near 42 degrees. Take a look at the captions of many infographics that show a rainbow with a single angle, and you will usually find some kind of asterisk. The authors are often oversimplifying the geometry for the sake of explanation.

So if 42 is being used as a clue, it may not simply mean “rainbow.” It may point more specifically toward the color red. Move slightly beyond red in the electromagnetic spectrum and you enter infrared. Move in the opposite direction beyond violet and you enter ultraviolet.

I personally like the ultraviolet side of the spectrum. There is something about old-school black lights and glowing paint that takes me back to being a kid, wandering through Spencer’s at the mall and seeing everything strange and neon come alive. But infrared is where the idea of “X-ray vision” starts to enter the conversation, at least metaphorically.

In Gold & Greed, Justin clearly shows that he is working with infrared. He even describes the project as essentially giving him x-ray vision. So when I see 42, I personally think of red, and red leads me back toward infrared and the project shrouded in mystery.

Having worked with that exact of board, those lights, and camera lenses, I am confident he is referring to red, and more specifically, infrared. Infrared light allows a camera to see in the dark when paired with a NoIR camera sensor, which is a camera sensor without the standard infrared-blocking filter. While infrared is commonly used as a light source in low-light or no-light settings, it can also reveal colors, materials, and surface details in ways the human eye cannot.

Getting back to how this relates to the hunt… Your guess is as good as mine. Justin may be just suggesting he is monitoring a location. I personally find it less palatable that a hunter must be able to use infrared to find the treasure. I lean more into the idea that Justin is providing a nod to something that only he needs to know but found it interesting and wanted to share. While the entry to see IR is low, it does require a tool. Albeit just your phone, but still a tool.

As I say in all my posts, anything I provide is subjective. It may or may not have a role in anything. It may sound like splitting hairs, but in a treasure hunt, splitting hairs is sometimes the whole game.

Other ideas for the meaning of the number 42 are out there. Some are very good and simpler. I have some other ideas that I will be sharing here in the near future. However, in this post, I wanted to provide something maybe you have not thought of.