What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
TLDR: “Very entertaining”
This is a fun book. It’s utterly pointless… but, that’s kind of the point.
The author created a popular web comic that gets passed around a lot in geek circles. At one time, he was a robotics engineer for NASA, so he has a scientific bent.
I have no idea how it got started, but people ask him weird questions, and he works very hard to provide them with scientifically accurate answers.
Some examples:
When, if ever, will the bandwidth of the Internet surpass FedEx? (meaning, if Fedex ever shipped nothing but hard drives filled with data, how much data would it ship?)
If two immortal people were placed on opposite sides of an uninhabited Earthlike planet, how long would it take them to find each other?
If you called a random phone number and said “God bless you,” how long would it be until you found someone who had just sneezed?
The book is very tongue in cheek, but the answers are real. The author does a lot of research about both the answers, and the variables for the questions. (Example: do the two wandering people know about each other? If so, then one of them should walk and the other should stay in the same place.)
Also, he includes some questions submitted by the readers of his comic which he doesn’t answer but which caused him a little concern:
If a Venus fly trap could eat a person, about how long would it take for the human to be fully de-juiced and absorbed?
If you saved a whole life’s worth of kissing and used all that suction power on one single kiss, how much suction force would that single kiss have?
He does a great job of explain things in ways I hadn’t considered. (Example: to stay in orbit, you don’t have to stay up; rather you just have to move sideways really fast.) And he supplements this with his signature stick figure comics that are more effective than anything more highly rendered would be.
Really fun book.
Book Data
- Author
- Randall Munroe
- Year
- Pages
- 303
- Acquired
- Not recorded
- Open Library
- OL17095301W
- Wikipedia
- What_If?_(book)
- I have read this book. According to my records, I completed it on .
- A hardcover copy of this book is currently in my home library.