What if scientific

Start your review of What If? Sep 01, Steve Alexander rated it it was amazing Shelves: real-books. This is one of the most entertaining books I have ever read. And I have read over 10 books. View all 59 comments. Nov 15, Patrick rated it it was amazing. I've been a reader of XKCD for ages. Not just a reader, a fan. A big goey, geeky fan. So much of a fan that when I heard about this book, I went so far as to abuse my power as an author to get an Advance Reading Copy of the book, so that I could enjoy its deliciousness sooner.

And it worked. I got an early copy. And I treasured it. I petted it. It was precious to me. Then life got in the way. Promotion for my own book launch. I had dad stuff to do. I had prep work for the yearly Worldbuilders fundraiser. Then I had my book tour Through all of this, I carried my precious ARC around, waiting for the time when I'd be able to spare the brainpower to read it. I even took it on tour with me. Honestly, this book has more frequent flier miles than any three of you put together.

It wasn't until I got back home that I started it. I wanted something to read before I went to bed, and I picked What If because I was worried if I picked up another book I'd be reading half the night and it would screw up my already dysfunctional sleep schedule. Despite my best intentions, I read half the book that night. It cost me precious sleep I couldn't afford to lose. But I don't regret it. Not a bit. It's clever, but if you know anything about Randall Munroe, that won't come as a surprise to you.

And it's funny, and witty which are two different things, by the way. But again to readers of XKCD this won't come as any sort of surprise. There's some decent science in there, but it wasn't anywhere nearly as brain-taxing as I'd expected. Munroe does a brilliant job of explaining very complex concepts simply. That's a rare gift. The other surprise is how much it pulled me in. I expected to read the book in dribs and drabs over a couple weeks.

Instead, I tore through it. That's not usually the case for me with non-fiction books. In brief, it's worth your time. Even if you haven't read his comic. Even if you haven't ever heard of Randall Munroe. Even if you're not into science. You should pick this up and read it.

You'll be glad you did. View all 16 comments. Sep 15, Manny rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: Geeks. Recommended to Manny by: notgettingenough. Shelves: well-i-think-its-funny , science , parody-homage , science-fiction. Q: What would happen if every geek in the world received a copy of What If tomorrow morning?

A: Actually, less than you'd think. First, a little background about this book. If you're a geek, it's unputdownable, a word that, if you think carefully, means "cannot be put down". You may not be aware of this fact, since the word is nearly always misused. So the geek who receives it is going to carry on reading through breakfast, through lunch, while he's supposed to be working, and on through dinner, Q: What would happen if every geek in the world received a copy of What If tomorrow morning?

So the geek who receives it is going to carry on reading through breakfast, through lunch, while he's supposed to be working, and on through dinner, ignoring the non-geek guests who have come to visit. He'll interrupt conversations every now and then to ask things like "Could you build a bridge across the Atlantic out of Lego bricks?

He'll finish just as the last guest leaves. There is a common myth, most likely spread by geeks, that what they do is somehow pretty important to Western civilization. If you're easily impressed by this kind of propaganda, you might expect that markets will crash as geek traders neglect their buy signals, nuclear experiments will explode as geek scientists look away from their control panels, and terrorists will strike with impunity as geek intelligence analysts fail to turn up for work.

All that sounds pretty bad. But let's stop and consider for a moment. Is any of the above geek behavior novel or unpredictable? Geeks are always doing this kind of thing, and society has learned to work around them. Important as they may be in the long run , there's always some dependable non-geek person ready to step in just in case the geek in question has stayed up all night playing Halo or watching a Star Wars marathon.

The non-geek will cover for them until the geek has got over their fifteen hour internet speed-chess session and is ready to do whatever it is they're actually being paid to do. So delivering a copy of What If to every geek in the world will only really have two important effects. It will make a great many geeks very happy, and assuming of course that the copies are paid for it will turn Randall Munroe into a billionaire.

And who could possibly have anything against that? View all 44 comments. Oct 16, Miranda Reads rated it really liked it Shelves: audiobook. Trying to thoroughly answer a stupid question can take you to some pretty interesting places. Randall Munroe, ex-NASA employee and author of the wildly popular webcomic XKCD, decides to look at several, undoubtedly, absurd questions and find scientific answers to them. Nothing is too absurd for him - whether it be the logistics of finding your soulmate to what happens if our moon suddenly disappears - Munroe answers it all.

I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive. I absolutely loved the tone of voice throughout the book. His hilarious deadpan just absolutely cinched this book for me. Who knew that physics could be so fun? Honestly, teachers need to stop the whole calculate-the-gravity-of-a-falling-ball shtick and jump on the calculate-the-force-of-wind-turbines-powered-by-people-at-a-gym bandwagon.

Seriously, just make learning fun and the rest will go from there. In short - yes! Loved this one - it was so much fun! Even when he read out the math problems - you can tell that he was into it. Really made the book enjoyable!

View all 23 comments. Dec 19, Felicia rated it it was amazing Shelves: non-fiction. I love love love it and frankly, there's no better book to read on the toilet. Of course in the style of xkcd, this and Atlas Obscura would be my go-to book gifts this year.

View all 10 comments. Oct 11, Valerie rated it it was amazing Shelves: math , newton-mania , baseball , science , sports , how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and.

My evil plan of reading this book in small doses aloud to my students during math class has worked. Several of them have bought their own copies, and they are, I believe, planning to use their math skills for good, and not for world domination. View all 18 comments. Dear Mr. Munroe, please consider this a standing invitation. When I was five, I was trying to figure out how difficult it would be to reach the Moon if I were to stack chairs on top of each other for a head start, beginning this enterprise from the roof of a 9-story building.

I was sure about a would do. I should have just contacted Randall Munroe. The author of this book is an Internet cartoonist, not a health or safety expert. He likes it when things catch fire or explode, which means he does not have your best interests in mind. Just watch out for salmonella. And the Andromeda Strain. How would the Earth change as the water was being drained? To see how, you need to read for yourself.

Then things would get interesting. But with world electricity consumption pushing 2 terawatts, it would take a hundred million Yodas to meet our demands. View all 21 comments. Jan 15, Paul Bryant rated it liked it Shelves: science.

And a person called Kenneth asked What if every day, every human had a 1 per cent chance of being turned into a turkey, and every turkey had a one percent chance of being turned into a human? Randall does not provide a response to that one but I would have said Kenneth, if only life were like that.

Everybody likes this book and I liked half of it, the other half was so far over my head it might have been a distant Andean condor croaking Sanskrit into a Bluetooth headset. Some of the stuff Randall devotes pages of detailed analysis to did not tickle my ivories, like What would happen if a hair dryer with continuous power were turned on and put into an airtight 1 x 1 x 1-meter box?

I mean, get a life. Who the flook cares about a hair dryer in a box? But many are very interesting. He tackles the old chestnut What would happen of everyone on Earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same time?

In regard to the jump and the landing itself, not so much would result. But then he imagines the implications of all those people trying to get back home from Rhode Island. If this mass jumping event was actually staged it would cause the immediate termination of civilisation and the death of billions.

The edge of the crowd spreads outward into southern Massachusetts and Connecticut. Any two people who meet are unlikely to have a language in common, and almost nobody knows the area. The state becomes a chaotic patchwork of coalescing and collapsing social hierarchies. Violence is common. You keep thinking of your own absurd questions — How many soldier ants would it take to chew through my leg in one hour?

And would I survive? Well, imagine a person was chained to one of those and had an infinite amount of small change within arms reach. Then imagine the vending machine gets refilled by the usual contractor in the usual way who never notices the chained person. So : how long would it take the captive to die from a constant diet of crap? If they were only eating chocs and crisps and drinking cokes? A month? Six months? A YEAR??

I may have to launch a practical experiment. View all 22 comments. Aug 29, Diane rated it really liked it Shelves: science , nonfiction , humorous. This book opens with the best disclaimer I have ever seen: "Do not try any of this at home. The publisher and the author disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects resulting, directly or indirectly, from information contained in this book.

Don't get too close -- these things could kill ya! On his website, he takes "absurd hypothetical questions" from readers and tries to answer some of them. Here are some of my favorite questions in this book: What would happen if everyone on Earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same instant?

If every human somehow simply disappeared from the face of the Earth, how long would it be before the last artificial light source would go out? How long could a nuclear submarine last in orbit? From what height would you need to drop a steak for it to be cooked when it hit the ground? If everyone on the planet stayed away from each other for a couple of weeks, wouldn't the common cold be wiped out?

Which US state is actually flown over the most? Is there enough energy to move the entire current human population off-planet? How high can a human throw something? When, if ever, will the bandwidth of the Internet surpass that of FedEx? How quickly would the oceans drain if a circular portal 10 meters in radius leading into space were created at the bottom of Challenger Deep, the deepest spot in the ocean?

How many Lego bricks would it take to build a bridge capable of carrying traffic from London to New York? Have that many Lego bricks been manufactured? What would happen to the Earth if the Sun suddenly switched off? If you are interested to know any of the answers to those questions, this book is for you! What made this so much fun, aside from the ridiculous questions, is Munroe's sense of humor. Several times I laughed out loud at his drawings and his answers, which is not something that usually happens when I'm reading about science.

Oh, and be sure to read his footnotes, which have even more jokes. I think this book would be a great gift for kids who love to ask crazy questions about how the world works. I think I would have loved it when I was It's the miracle of Goodreads! View all 14 comments. Nov 22, Riku Sayuj rated it really liked it Shelves: humor , science-gen , dystopian. Org Petition: Despicable Munroe The International Astronomical Union recently named an asteroid after Randall Munroe; asteroid Munroe is big enough to cause a mass extinction if it ever hits Earth.

Not that he needs an asteroid to do that. He has his minions devising millions of ways to do it, on a subversive site they call xkcd. This book is a set of leaked manuals. It should be clear to all how dangerous this guy and his site really is. But all Government agencies fail to heed Change. But all Government agencies fail to heed my warnings. I exhort you to read this and then contact your local representative immediately. We can stop him.

If you still have doubts, let me remind you of numerous disaster movies — there is always only ONE GUY who saw it coming! Do you really want to ignore me? Eager for your support, Thanks. View all 12 comments. Sep 04, Philip rated it it was amazing Shelves: non-fiction. One of the things that's nice about goodreads is that it lets you embed pictures. I'm pretty sure that if you're here, you already know about xkcd.

But hey, why the heck not? The book comes from his "what if" blog, which is also very good. I took the book into work with One of the things that's nice about goodreads is that it lets you embed pictures.

I took the book into work with me to show it around - you know - hipster-esque and what not. I'm reading this trendy, new book first. But the guys at my table were all like, "Yeah I can see myself reading like 2 or 3 of these and then putting the book down Then I looked at the book a little bit more closely, flipped through a little bit and thought, "Huh That's probably what I'm going to do This is mostly because kids in arguments try to prove points by using them stupidly.

You know: "But what if Hitler hadn't killed the Jews? Would you like him then? You have to admit, it's pretty crazy that we've given this guy a holiday, right? So, I took the book home - slightly shamed that I hadn't realized it was more for coffee tables than actual reading. After all, dinos dominated for million years prior to the Earth-shattering event.

Researchers have speculated that intelligent "dinosauroids" might have evolved in humanity's place, based on the relatively large brain size of late-emerging trodontid species, which were bird-like predators. If all 7 billion of us crowded close together and jumped, we would make the Earth move just one-hundredth of the radius of a single atom per second. When we landed, Earth would move back in place, like a spring. Huge tides generated by the moon which orbited much closer to Earth when it formed washed the chemical building blocks for life from land into the oceans and helped stir up the primordial soup.

Without it, life may never have arisen, or living things would have very different behavioral patterns to cope with the six-hour day and extreme climate changes that would exist on a moonless Earth.

If humans were twice as intelligent as we are now, experts think we would be more fulfilled on an individual scale, as well as healthier, better looking and less religious. But people would still have a diverse range of personalities, and so society as a whole might be just as conflicted as it is today. Cats may seem ineffectual, but they're in fact vital members of the global ecosystem. From studies that have looked at the effects of removing cats from small islands, we know that, without them, Earth would quickly become overrun by rodents.

It would, however, start to eat away at the surface, blasting tiny fragments of the ball in all directions. These fragments would be going so fast that when they hit air molecules, they would trigger two or three more rounds of fusion. After about 70 nanoseconds the ball would arrive at home plate. Collisions with the air would have eaten the ball away almost completely, and it would now be a bullet-shaped cloud of expanding plasma mainly carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen ramming into the air and triggering more fusion as it went.

The shell of x-rays would hit the batter first, and a handful of nanoseconds later the debris cloud would hit. When it would reach home plate, the center of the cloud would still be moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. It would hit the bat first, but then the batter, plate, and catcher would all be scooped up and carried backward through the backstop as they disintegrated. The shell of x-rays and superheated plasma would expand outward and upward, swallowing the backstop, both teams, the stands, and the surrounding neighborhood— all in the first microsecond.

The first thing you would see would be a blinding light, far outshining the sun. This would gradually fade over the course of a few seconds, and a growing fireball would rise into a mushroom cloud. Then, with a great roar, the blast wave would arrive, tearing up trees and shredding houses. Everything within roughly a mile of the park would be leveled, and a firestorm would engulf the surrounding city.

The baseball diamond, now a sizable crater, would be centered a few hundred feet behind the former location of the backstop. Major League Baseball Rule 6. What would happen if everyone on Earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same instant?

This is one the most popular questions submitted through my website. They cover the kinematics pretty well. This crowd takes up an area the size of Rhode Island. Earth outweighs us by a factor of over ten trillion. On average, we humans can vertically jump maybe half a meter on a good day.

A slight pulse of pressure spreads through the North American continental crust and dissipates with little effect. The sound of all those feet hitting the ground creates a loud, drawn-out roar lasting many seconds. A cell phone comes out of a pocket.