What If?

Science and nature

First published: 2014
Print length: 303 pagesHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014

Description

What If? answers absurd hypothetical questions with serious scientific reasoning and a taste for catastrophic outcomes. Usually devoting one chapter to a single scenario, Randall Munroe calculates the consequences of such extremes as a baseball thrown near the speed of light, a potentially lethal speed bump, and a robot apocalypse. He draws on computer simulations, military research, differential equations, and consultations with experts, translating each investigation into accessible explanations accompanied by xkcd comics. The book combines new material with expanded versions of popular answers from the xkcd website, allowing curiosity to range freely across physics, engineering, biology, and other fields. Its central pleasure comes from watching rigorous methods applied to ridiculous premises—and discovering how quickly ordinary assumptions collapse under extreme conditions.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Conversational · Direct · Technical · Witty

Pace

Brisk

Tone

Cerebral · Humorous · Irreverent · Playful

Structure

Episodic

Focus

Ideas · Information

Emotional intensity

1 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 2 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 2 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

Knowledge and truthNature and environmentTechnology and society

About Randall Munroe

Randall Munroe is an American cartoonist, author, and engineer who has worked full-time on his webcomic xkcd since 2006, after experience as a contract programmer and roboticist at NASA’s Langley Research Center. His work moves easily between minimalist comics and popular-science explanation, using technical knowledge as a source of both clarity and comedy. In xkcd, spare stick figures carry conversations about programming, mathematics, language, romance, and social embarrassment. His books expand that method through different formal constraints. What If? applies serious calculations and research to absurd hypothetical questions, often following them toward disastrous conclusions. Thing Explainer uses diagrams and a deliberately restricted vocabulary to reconstruct complex subjects in plain language, while How To solves ordinary problems through extravagantly impractical chains of physics and engineering. Across these forms, Munroe’s characteristic move is to take a playful premise more seriously than expected. The result is a body of work distinguished by precise reasoning, economical drawing, and sustained curiosity about how technical systems intersect with everyday human behavior.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Language: English
ISBN: 9780544272996, 9780544456860

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