From the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, a hilarious and informative book of popular science that provides answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask.
Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe's iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have a large and passionate following.
Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions. What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? If there was a robot apocalypse, how long would humanity last?
In pursuit of answers for these fascinating thought experiments, Munroe runs computer simulations, pores over stacks of declassified military research memos, solves differential equations, and consults with nuclear reactor operators. His responses are masterpieces of clarity and hilarity, complemented by signature xkcd comics. They often predict the complete annihilation of humankind, or at least a really big explosion.
The book features new and never-before-answered questions, along with updated and expanded versions of the most popular answers from the xkcd website. What If? will be required reading for xkcd fans and anyone who loves STEM books and pondering the hypothetical.
Randall Munroe's fully-researched, deeply unserious answers explore:
- Absurd Science: From draining the oceans to building a periodic table out of the actual elements, discover the often-explosive consequences of taking silly ideas seriously.
- Hypothetical Questions: What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light? Or if a robot apocalypse finally happened?
- Physics Explained: Munroe breaks down complex topics like relativistic physics and thermodynamics with clarity, wit, and detailed computer simulations.
- Signature Stick-Figure Comics: Each answer is complemented by the iconic xkcd comics that make complex science accessible and hilarious.
Industry Reviews
"What If? maintains a delightfully free-wheeling tone throughout, especially when complicated calculations lead to whimsical results...Despite all the hard facts and gigantic numbers, it never feels like a textbook--and you don't have to be a rocket scientist to enjoy it. A." -- Entertainment Weekly
"Catchy and approachable...There's plenty of scientific rigor behind his elaborate explanations but he punctuates them with sly humor and winningly primitive cartoon diagrams...A cut above so many popular science and technology books." -- NPR.org
"Consistently fascinating and entertaining...Munroe leavens the hard science with whimsical touches...An illuminating handbook of methods of reasoning." -- Wall Street Journal
"It's fun to watch as Munroe tackles each question and examines every possible complication with nerdy and methodical aplomb, his distinctive scribblings providing clever running commentary of peanut-gallery jokes as his train of thought (sometimes) happily derails. The delightfully demented What If? is the most fun you can have with math and science, short of becoming your own evil genius...We feel the tug of Munroe's playful yet existentially-tinged worldview, and all that geek logic and number-crunching becomes unexpectedly poignant." -- Boston Globe
"Munroe has hit on a wonderful form of science and engineering communication that can do so much--extolling the value of analytical thinking, examining data, and doing back-of-the-envelope calculations--while entertaining readers at the same time... an incredibly fun book with quirky, hand-drawn pictures." -- American Scientist
