What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Qu... by Randall Munroe

Munroe also footnotes interestingly, such as in the response to “What if you had a mole of moles?” In pondering the problems one Avogadro of furry critters would generate, he neatly discovers something he’s “never noticed before - a cubic mile happens to be almost exactly 4/3π cubic kilometers, so a sphere with a radius of X kilometers has the same volume as a cube that’s X miles on each side.” He also nicely cartoons what nearly everyone thinks of a star-nosed mole upon seeing one. The explanations elucidate interesting natural, mathematical, and scientific phenomena - from how lightning works to why temperature in space is a fraught concept to how to calculate momentum for rockets turned inward on a submarine (for a superficially good reason, given the absurd circumstances created by one particular question). The answers embody how to break down a problem, use assumptions and data, model out an answer, and contemplate consequences. The journey from the absurd question to the relatively solid answer is always interesting. Munroe’s drawing style is like his intellectual style - spare, efficient, and winning. His caption credit on the drawing of the person jumping off Mount Thor made me laugh out loud, as did the quadrant graph categorizing the quality of ideas. Each response is clearly written and embroidered with witty and appropriate cartoons, many of which do the “a picture is worth a thousand words” heavy lifting you’d expect. There isn’t a dud question in the lot, and all are within the bounds promised on the book’s cover.

If you had a printed version of the whole of (say, the English) Wikipedia, how many printers would you need in order to keep up with the changes made to the live version?.When - if ever - will the bandwidth of the Internet surpass that of FedEx?.What if a glass of water was, all of a sudden, literally half empty?.

What would happen if you made a periodic table out of cube-shaped bricks, where each brick was made of the corresponding element?.

If every person on Earth aimed a laser pointer at the moon at the same time, would it change color?.

What If? takes ridiculous scientific questions Munroe has received or encountered over the years and answers many of them - questions like:

The book captures the most popular questions coming from the What If? blog developed as an offshoot of xkcd. You may recognize Munroe from the excellent and popular online cartoon, xkcd, which employs stick figures, witty framing, and science jokes in service of a minimalist yet consistently sophisticated comic. One of my favorite journeys is from the ridiculous to the sublime, and Randall Munroe’s entertaining and interesting new book, What If: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions is filled with and defined by such journeys.

What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Qu... by Randall Munroe