What If?
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.
Stats for nerds
24recommend
63mentions
61people
2013–2025years
38% recommend62% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Be warned I'm mostly going for the "other interesting stuff" copout here:
○ The Soul of a New Machine (Tracy Kidder) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
○ The Cuckoo's Egg (Clifford Stoll) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)
○ Angry White Pyjamas (Robert Twigger) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angry_White_Pyjamas
○ Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (Keith Johnstone) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impro:_Improvisation_and_the_T...
○ What If? (Randall Munroe) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_If%3F_(book)
○ The Inventions of Daedalus (David E.H. Jones) - https://archive.org/details/inventionsofdaed0000jone
That last one is sadly out of print now but fairly easy to obtain secondhand - if you like Randall Munroe's `What If?` books then this is likely to appeal to you too.
- The "What If?" books by Randall Munroe (of XKCD fame) cover topics like this with that kind of thought process.
- If you like absurd questions like this with real scientific responses, you might enjoy the “What If?” books [1] by Randall Munroe (creator of xkcd).
They are full of questions like this, often with a humorous spin. Entertaining and educational.
Some sample questions from the Amazon description:
- 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?
- End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin. Instead of just bemoaning the current state of politics, Turchin uses a data-informed comparison to previous, similar cycles to see where we're headed.
What if? 2 by Randall Munroe. The physics, biology, and chemistry textbook we should have had in high school.
Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist by Frans de Waal. Primatologist with half a century of experience analyzes current gender identity debates from the viewpoint of someone who knows about more than one primate species (not just humans).
- What if by Randall Munroe Not rigorous but it changed my perspective that was instilled in me in middle school. Otherwise Feynman Notes changed me academically. Easier to pickup math through physics if you arent looking for deeply pure avenues.
- I'm excited about the new oddball science book by XKCD cartoonist Randall Munroe. ("What If 2")
