What If? (1980)
What If? is a 1980 mathematics book written by Randall Munroe.
Readers of the webcomic xkcd kept sending Randall Munroe absurd hypotheticals, so he started answering them with real physics. What happens if you pitch a baseball at ninety percent the speed of light? How long would humanity last against a robot uprising? Munroe takes each question seriously, running the math, digging through declassified reports, and phoning experts, then reporting the results in plain language beside his stick-figure cartoons. Most answers end in some form of catastrophe, which is part of the fun. A former NASA roboticist turns idle curiosity into rigorous, very funny science.
Quick answers
What is What If? about?
Readers of the webcomic xkcd kept sending Randall Munroe absurd hypotheticals, so he started answering them with real physics. What happens if you pitch a baseball at ninety percent the speed of light? How long would humanity last against a robot uprising? Munroe takes each question seriously, running the math, digging through declassified reports, and phoning experts, then reporting the results in plain language beside his stick-figure cartoons. Most answers end in some form of catastrophe, which is part of the fun. A former NASA roboticist turns idle curiosity into rigorous, very funny science.
When was What If? published?
What If? was published in 1980.
Who made What If??
What If? was written by Randall Munroe.
Similar books
A few thoughts on What If?
Randall Munroe's follow-ups Thing Explainer and What If? 2 run the same experiment in fresh directions. For the same mix of curiosity and hard numbers, Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything traces how we learned what we know, while Mary Roach applies the same deadpan rigor to the squishier questions science usually avoids answering out loud.