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I recall reading about a man who has solved some very significant question--The meaning of life, perhaps. But nobody ever gets to hear this profound discovery because he becomes distracted and the entire revelation is lost to him.
I thought this story might have been part of Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy or one of Douglas Adams' books, but I simply cannot find the story. Please note, I am not thinking of Deep Thought.
I apologize if this is too vague, but I just can't remember the details
If you are thinking of the Hitchhikers guide, this could be Fenchurch
“And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.”
She is promptly destroyed by the Vogons. On the replacement earth, she exists and is romantically linked to Arthur. However, she can never quite place the solution to everything again. (annoyingly I can't find the quote for that)
I think French is correct, and this is the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Fenchurch is probably who you are thinking of, but she wasn't distracted, and didn't necessarily know the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. The Question cannot be known in the same universe as the Answer, as is explained by Prak (who knows everything in the universe because he took a truth serum). In the latter part of the fourth book, Arthur and Fenchurch seek to find God's last message to his creation, which the pair believe might be what Fenchurch is looking for. Indeed, when they finally reach the location of the words and Fenchurch reads it, she says "yes, that was it", in response to the message. This website suggests an interpretation I hadn't thought of, which is that the message is different for everyone (I don't really buy this intepretation). The message as read by Marvin is
"We apologize for the inconvenience" Which isn't really a question or answer.
As for a man getting distracted, you might be conflating Fenchurch with the most powerful man in the universe (from the third book). Since the president of the galaxy is the last person who should actually rule, the person with all the power is someone who doesn't give a crap. This person is unnamed, and lives in a cabin alone on a planet with his cat. He gets distracted very easily. People from the government come to him and asks him questions, which he promptly forgets about. I believe this is what you are remembering.
I can speak with some authority on this subject.
I think it is this scene from Monty Python's the Meaning of Life
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was interrupted while composing the poem Kubla Khan in 1797:
On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!
... Kubla Khan ... was never completed. ...
There are many stories where a character (or even the real author) is interrupted by someone and forgets something important.
The Coleridge story has led to a "person from Porlock" becoming a literary allusion to such cases in general, as well as the above specific case.
In Michael Chriton's The Andromeda Strain there was a biologist working on the problem of a disease that's been brought back to earth aboard a satellite that crashes near a small dessert town, killing almost everyone in the community in a matter of minutes. The biologist has a flash of insight regarding how the disease works and why only a very young baby and an elderly alcoholic seem to have been immune to its effects. Before being able to tell any of the other scientists working at the facility, an alarm goes off. The flashing lights that accompany the alarm trigger an epileptic seizure in the biologist, who then cannot remember the earlier train of thought.
