What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

Randall Munroe, author of the brilliant xkcd cartoons, sprinkles a good selection of his cartoon magic throughout What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, but the real joy comes from the absurd brilliance in trying to give scientific answers to questions such as, “From what height would you need to drop a steak for it to be cooked when it hit the ground?” (Spoiler: you can’t, but you can burn the surface off something special.)

Not only are the questions bizarre, so too is much of the real research which is used in trying to answer them. In some cases it’s almost as much fun trying to work out why a particular fact was ever unearthed.

Great fun and occasionally educational, but one word of warning – the content is pretty much all from Munroe’s website, so if you have been a regular reader of that site over the years then the book will be a fun nostalgia tour rather than a new entertainment.

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Buy What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe here.