For everyone who’s curious about what’s new under (and over and around) the stars.

Douglas Adams famously pronounced in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that the answer to life, the universe, and everything was 42. Quirks & Quarks, whose approach to science owes almost as much to Adams as it does to Newton or Einstein or Hawking, have flipped that notion through a gap in the space-time continuum (or something like that) and come up with answers to the 42 essential questions about space.

Much about the universe is very hard for most of us to grasp, and if anyone can explain these mind-bending aspects of the heavens above, it’s the Quirks & Quarks producers, who have been bringing Canadians understandable science, with trademark humour, for more than thirty years. In their Guide to Space , they answer such pressing questions as Where does space begin? Why is most of the universe missing? Is there intelligent life in the universe? And the real puzzler: What came before the Big Bang? They also answer questions we wish we’d thought to ask, such as Can you surf a gravity wave? and Why is the universe’s temperature on my TV? There are answers as well to far more practical questions, like What happens when you fall into a black hole? and How will the universe end? The answers, which have been vetted by a team of astronomers, are witty, authoritative, in-depth, accurate, up-to-date astronomically, and, of course, quirky.