What If? 10th Anniversary Edition: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

Name: What If? 10th Anniversary Edition: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
Rating: 4.635748386383057 (2512 reviews)

Randall Munroe

Nov 2024 · HarperCollins

4.6

2.51K reviews

Ebook

320

Pages

Eligible

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About this ebook

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 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, 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 to ponder the hypothetical.

Ratings and reviews

4.6

2.51K reviews

Kim Schmidt

August 23, 2024

dry first time through but interesting and a good brain stretch using physics and imagination in the best combo. the reread was better than the first time through; I found the author's literary cadence and it vibed better after that understanding.

Ian Darby

April 20, 2016

My step-grandmother came over last month and gave us a couple books. This one I started reading and fell in love with. I loved this book so much. It was an awesome concoction of questions I would think of throughout the day. You would probably like this book if you are one of the following: A science lover A sports lover Anyone else. If you really like this book, I would recommend Geek Physics. The book also had a sarcastic humor to it. The drawings were hilarious and the questions were crazy. This is a definite 5 star for me.

36 people found this review helpful

Mariko Sotomura

December 22, 2014

A little bit slow and boring at first, but it gets interesting in the middle, and then gets boring again. The book is full of information mostly the public doesn't know about (In essence, a lot of technical words). As a result, it gets overwhelming and not fun to read. The graphics sometimes helps, yet it sometimes mess you up.

4 people found this review helpful

About the author

Randall Munroe is the author of the webcomic xkcd and the New York Times bestsellers What If?, What If? 2, Thing Explainer, and How To. A former NASA roboticist, he left the agency in 2006 to draw comics on the internet full time. The International Astronomical Union has named an asteroid after him; that asteroid, 4942 Munroe, is large enough that it could cause widespread devastation if it were to hit Earth. He lives in Massachusetts.

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