What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions - Softcover

Munroe Randall

Softcover

ISBN 10: 184854958X ISBN 13: 9781848549586

Publisher: John Murray Publishers, 2014

Synopsis

From the creator of the wildly popular xkcd.com, hilarious and informative answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask. Millions visit xkcd.com each week to read randall munroe's iconic webcomic. Fans ask him a lot of strange questions: how fast can you hit a speed bump, driving, and live? when (if ever) did the sun go down on the british empire? when will facebook contain more profiles of dead people than living? how many humans would a t rex rampaging through new york need to eat a day? in pursuit of answers, munroe runs computer simulations, pores over stacks of declassified military research memos, solves differential equations and consults nuclear reactor operators. His responses are masterpieces of clarity and hilarity, complemented by comics. They often predict the complete annihilation of humankind, or at least a really big explosion.

About this title

Review

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, September 2014: What if everyone on earth aimed a laser pointer at the moon at the same time? What if you could drain all the water from the oceans? What if all the lightning in the world struck the same place? What if there were a book that considered weird, sometimes ridiculous questions, and it was so compelling that you found yourself skimming its pages to find out what would happen if you threw a baseball at light speed? With What If, Randall Munroe has written such a book. As he does in his extraordinarily popular xkcd webcomic, Munroe applies reason and research to hypothetical conundrums ranging from the philosophical to the scientific (often absurd, but never pseudo) that probably seemed awesome in your elementary school days—but were never sufficiently answered. It’s the rare combination of edifying and fun. —Jon Foro

About the Author

Randall Munroe is the creator of the webcomic xkcd and author of xkcd: Volume 0. Randall was born in Easton, Pennsylvania, and grew up outside Richmond, Virginia. After studying physics at Christopher Newport University, he got a job building robots at NASA Langley Research Center. In 2006 he left NASA to draw comics on the internet full time, and has since been nominated for a Hugo Award three times. The International Astronomical Union recently named an asteroid after him: asteroid 4942 Munroe is big enough to cause mass extinction if it ever hits a planet like Earth.

Edition details

• Publisher: John Murray Publishers
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 184854958X
• ISBN 13: 9781848549586
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English