The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a comic science fiction series created by Douglas Adams that has become popular among fans of the genre and members of the scientific community. Phrases from it are widely recognised and often used in reference to, but outside the context of, the source material. Many writers on popular science, such as Fred Alan Wolf, Paul Davies, and Michio Kaku, have used quotations in their books to illustrate facts about cosmology or philosophy. The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42 In the radio series and the first novel, a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything from the supercomputer Deep Thought, specially built for this purpose. It takes Deep Thought million years to compute and check the answer, which turns out to be 42. Deep Thought points out that the answer seems meaningless because the beings who instructed it never knew what the question was. When asked to produce the Ultimate Question, Deep Thought says that it cannot; however, it can help to design an even more powerful computer that can. This new computer will incorporate living beings into the "computational matrix" and will run for ten million years. The computer is revealed as being the planet Earth, with its pan-dimensional creators assuming the form of white lab mice to observe its running. The process is hindered after eight million years by the unexpected arrival on Earth of the Golgafrinchans, and is then ruined completely, five minutes prior to completion, when the Earth is destroyed by the Vogons to supposedly make way for a new hyperspace bypass. In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, this reason is revealed to have been a ruse: the Vogons had been hired to destroy the Earth by a consortium of psychiatrists, led by Gag Halfrunt, who feared for the loss of their careers when the Ultimate Question became known. Lacking a real question, the mice (pan-dimensional beings) decide not to go through the whole process again and instead settle for the out-of-thin-air suggestion "How many roads must a man walk down?", a lyric from Bob Dylan's song "Blowin' in the Wind". At the end of the radio series, the television series and , Arthur Dent, having escaped the Earth's destruction, potentially has some of the computational