What if?

Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

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 …

303 pages

English language

Published Aug. 7, 2014 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Show more
ISBN:
978-0-544-27299-6
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
872620028
Goodreads:
21413662

View on OpenLibrary

View on Inventaire

Subjects
  • Mathematics
  • Statistics
  • Miscellanea
  • Science
  • Questions and answers
  • Physics

Reviews

Review of 'What If?' on 'Goodreads'

Parts of this book went over my head, but I still enjoyed it alot. It is a love letter to science and curiousity, answering questions I never knew I had.

My one problem with this book is the "weird and worrying questions"-sections, as it at times points fun at the questions, and other times just serve as unanswered interesting questions. Where is the fun in that?

I ended up getting the UK version of this, which had a fun preface explaining its use of units. I still would have preferred the metric system.