What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
Randall Munroe, 2014
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780544272996
Summary
From the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, hilarious and informative 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 an enormous, dedicated following, as do his deeply researched answers to his fans’ strangest questions.
The queries he receives range from merely odd to downright diabolical:
• What if I took a swim in a spent-nuclear-fuel pool?
• Could you build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns?
• What if a Richter 15 earthquake hit New York City?
• Are fire tornadoes possible?
His responses are masterpieces of clarity and wit, gleefully and accurately explaining everything from the relativistic effects of a baseball pitched at near the speed of light to the many horrible ways you could die while building a periodic table out of all the actual elements.
The book features new and never-before-answered questions, along with the most popular answers from the xkcd website. What If? is an informative feast for xkcd fans and anyone who loves to ponder the hypothetical.(From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 17, 1984
• Where—Easton, Pennsylvania, USA
• Raised—near Richmond, Virginia
• Education—B.S., Christopher Newport University
• Currently—lives in Somerville, Massachusetts
Randall Patrick Munroe is an American webcomic author/artist and former NASA roboticist. He is the creator of the webcomic xkcd, which after leaving NASA, he has devoted himself to full time. His book, What If: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions was published in 2014.
Munroe was a fan of the funny pages from an early age, starting off with Calvin and Hobbes. After attending the Chesterfield County Mathematics and Science High School at Clover Hill, he graduated from Christopher Newport University in 2006 with a degree in physics.
Before and after graduation, Munroe worked as an independent contracting roboticist for NASA at the Langley Research Center. In October, 2006, when his contract with NASA was not renewed, he began to write xkcd full-time. He now supports himself by the sale of xkcd related merchandise. The webcomic quickly became very popular, garnering up to 70 million hits a month by October 2007.
According to Munroe, xkcd is unpronounceable. Here are his own words:
It's not actually an acronym. It's just a word with no phonetic pronunciation—a treasured and carefully-guarded point in the space of four-character strings.
He has also toured the lecture circuit, giving speeches, including a TED Talk at Google's Googleplex in Mountain View, California.
Munroe lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. In June, 2011, he announced that his fiancee had been diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. The couple were married that September.
In September 2013, Munroe announced that a group of xkcd readers had submitted his name as a candidate for the renaming of asteroid (4942) 1987 DU6 to 4942 Munroe which was accepted by the International Astronomical Union. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/10/2014.)
Visit the author's book page.
Book Reviews
By speaking the language of geeks...while dealing with relationships and the meaning of a computer-centric life, xkcd has become required reading for techies across the world…. The Internet has also created a bond between Mr. Munroe and his readers that is exceptional. They reenact in real life the odd ideas he puts forward in his strip.
New York Times
For scientists, the price of progress is specialization. When the goal of any researcher is to lay claim to a tiny niche in a crowded discipline, it’s hard for laypeople to find answers to the really important interdisciplinary questions. Questions like, "Is it possible to build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns?" Fortunately, such people can turn to Randall Munroe, the author of the xkcd comic strip loved by fans of internet culture.... For Munroe, who writes with a clarity and wit honed over eight years of writing captions for his webcomic, the fact that a question might be impossible to solve is no deterrent to pursuing it.
Wall Street Journal - Speakeasy blog
With his steady regimen of math jokes, physics jokes, and antisocial optimism, xkcd creator Randall Munroe, a former NASA roboticist, scores traffic numbers in NBC.com or Oprah.com territory. One key to the strip’s success may be that it doesn’t just comment on nerd culture, it embodies nerd culture.
Wired
What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions includes old favorites, new inquiries and the mix of expert research and accessible wit that has made Munroe a favorite among both geeks and laymen.
Time magazine
Munroe takes inane, useless and often quite pointless questions asked by real humans (mostly sent to him through his website), and turns them into beautiful expositions on the impossible that illuminate the furthest reaches, almost to the limits, of the modern sciences. The answers are all illustrated with XKCD’s trademark stick figures...and these are eminently approachable.
Newsweek
What If? maintains a delightfully free-wheeling tone throughout, especially when complicated calculations lead to whimsical results. (Did you know that Yoda’s Force power roughly translates to the amount of energy used to drive a smart car?) 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.
Entertainment Weekly
Discussion Questions
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