Books › What If?
What If?
408 pages
A delightful exercise in taking the most ridiculous questions imaginable and answering them with rigorous, cheerfully apocalyptic science.
What it feels like
Reading this feels like sitting at a bar with a brilliant physicist who has decided to take your most ridiculous late-night thoughts completely seriously. The experience is brisk and endlessly digestible, built on short chapters that start with a simple, absurd premise and inevitably escalate into global annihilation or a really big explosion. The tone is a masterful blend of deadpan humor and genuine scientific enthusiasm, making complex physics and mathematics feel incredibly accessible. It is a deeply playful book, wrapping rigorous research in expressive stick-figure comics and wry footnotes. It delights the inner child and the adult nerd alike, offering a cheerful, inquisitive space where curiosity is rewarded with hilarious, meticulously calculated catastrophe.
- Mood
- playful
- inquisitive
- lighthearted
- cheerfully apocalyptic
- Tone
- deadpan
- enthusiastic
- wry
- analytical
- absurd
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- the joy of curiosity · taking the absurd seriously · scientific escalation · unintended consequences
- The writing
- Conversational, highly accessible, and rigorously analytical, punctuated by deadpan footnotes and expressive stick-figure illustrations.
- The arc
- Begins with mild, amusing curiosity and escalates rapidly into delighted astonishment as mundane premises yield catastrophic scientific conclusions.
- Who it's for
- Curious tinkerers, science enthusiasts, and anyone who loves following a ridiculous hypothetical question to its absolute logical extreme.
Content notes
- hypothetical mass destruction
- comedic death
About the book
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.
Description from Open Library.
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