Ah, this book was so much fun! I’ve read Munroe’s comic strip — xkcd — on and off for years, and have seen some of his “what if” questions online when they’ve gone viral. Here, he’s collected a bunch of weird, wonderful questions and answered them with an excellent combination of math, science, and humor.
“They say there are no stupid questions. That’s obviously wrong; I think my question about hard and soft things, for example, is pretty stupid. But it turns out that trying to thoroughly answer a stupid question can take you to some pretty interesting places.”
So Randall Munroe worked for NASA, and then quit to start his webcomic. At some point, he began answering weird, write in questions from readers that usually ran along the lines of” What if the Earth starts slowly expanding?” or “Could I use a machine gun as a personal jet pack?”. He answers the questions using his big old NASA brain, but makes the explanations understandable and very, very funny. Even if you have no interest in/understanding of physics (me!), you’ll still love this book. It’s hysterical. His little asides and footnotes cracked me up, as did his comics (of course). Will Wheaton apparently narrates the audiobook, and while that seems like a match made in heaven, I think the audio version, in this case, would be seriously inferior to the print.
And now some of my favorite lines:
“I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to someone who tried to swim in their radiation containment pool. “In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”
“The explosion would be just the right size to maximize the amount of paperwork your lab would face. If the explosion were smaller, you could potentially cover it up. If it were larger, there would be no one left in the city to submit paperwork to.”
“Think of the elements as dangerous, radioactive, short-lived Pokémon.” <– probably my favorite question/answer: “What would happen if you made a periodic table out of cube shaped bricks, where each brick was made of the corresponding element?” Short answer: Not something you would want to do. So much death.