I have recently been reading Douglas Adams’s A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and this will probably be the 80th time. For the average reader, Adams’s grasp on wordplay and humor in combination with his eccentrically realistic and genuine characters makes reading any book he has ever published a truly enjoyable occasion for any reader of any age. But Adams’s real accomplishment with this series is engaging a lot of the scientific community in pleasure reading. On the surface of the books is a wonderful plot with copious amounts of humor and action, but underneath the surface, Douglas Adams opens the floor to a wide range of scientific concepts and phenomena that the science community loves to dissect and use in their pandering of the unfathomable “What If” questions. Incredibly, I have met many an engineer and computer programmer who had never picked up a copy of Jane Eyre or The Great Gatsby, but will rave for hours about Adam’s work and spend countless hours spouting quotes from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and So Long, and Thanks for All The Fish. Sadly, Douglas Adams died in 2001 at the age of 49 leaving behind several incomplete written works and radio series to be completed by other writers.

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