Randall Munroe

The creator of the incredibly popular webcomic xkcd presents his heavily researched answers to his fans' oddest questions, including “What if I took a swim in a spent-nuclear-fuel pool?” and “Could you build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns?” 100,000 first printing.

Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

What If?

Patrick Book

What fun! Who knew science could be so silly.

Pratik M

As brilliant as his famous xkcd comic strip. Rich in scientific detail as he takes on insanely absurd hypotheticals. You may need basic knowledge about physics, chemistry, and biology to fully appreciate it but hey, if you completed high school and enjoy delving into "what ifs", this is the book for you. I hope to read many more volumes of his work. Keep those questions flowing, people!

Monicap

the audiobook, narrated by will Wheaton, was very good.

Jason Lo

Closer to a 2.5

For a book about thinking up solutions to problems, it’s probably more enjoyable if you don’t think about it too hard.

It's so over the top, absurd, and ridiculous it's hilarious 🤣🤣 i especially love the Weird (and Worrying) Questions from the What If? Inbox sections that he didn't even bother to answer. Like we may argue that there's no stupid question but gdi it can 🤣 in fact 🤣 be weird 🤣 and worrying 🤣. I regret not screenshoting my favorite moments from the beginning, i have lots! Some that i managed to take
- Assuming a relatively uniform resonant frequency in a passenger jet, how many cats, meowing at what resonant frequency of said jet, would be required to "bring it down"?
- What if everyone in Great Britain went to one of the coasts and started paddling? Could they move the island at all?

I really love the neutron star bullet answer too. Having our blood sucked within 8.6 seconds forming a liquid sphere around the bullet and having our less dense finger and arms float on it? God deimn. I'd definitely read this again!

Satyajeet Pal

A fun quirky read to pass time in between more serious novels. In xkcd style, Munroe explores really varied topics with humor and some scientific accuracy.

Nenad Nikolic

Really awesome book. From the author of great xkcd comics comes a collection of mind bending studies about the world and all the stuff that nobody ever wanted to know. I have never read such a creative book, and if you ever wanted to see half-comic book half-science textbook this is the one to see. It comes with references to real research papers in case you are not sure it is for real. Deserves five stars just for the effort and research and everything else is a bonus.

Joy Bush

If you enjoy the XKCD.com comics then you will love the book as well. 

Its hilarious and has lots of science goodness. 

Highly recommend to everyone.

altlovesbooks

When I worked an office job many (...many) years ago, I had a small group of two or three friends with whom I used to shoot the breeze with via email (in the beforetime before office-wide messaging apps became all the rage) all day. Inbetween mundane office gossip, I'd occasionally posit random hypothetical questions, and my friends were, well, friend enough to indulge me most of the time. The number of staples to fill a cubicle, how many staplers to stack to the ceiling, whether Spiderman or Batman would win in a fight, things like that. There never was any satisfactory/conclusive answer to any of them, but the resulting discussion was often rewarding in itself.

This book feeds that "I wonder..." voice in my head that never really shuts up. I'm a big science nerd, and I love all the math and science and logic used to come up with the solid conclusions to these random questions that I never knew I had. How much Force power can Yoda output? How high can a human throw something? How quickly would the oceans drain if a circular portal 10 meters in radius leading into space were created at the bottom of Challenger Deep? You know, reasonable questions like that. The answers are surprising in some cases, and I walked away with random factoids about Pangaea/Rodinia, the Oxford Bell, the Wow! signal, a dude who flew over Los Angeles using a lawn chair and weather balloons, and the Pitcairn Islands. 

I also loved the inclusion of so many XKCD-style graphics within the chapters (you know, because the XKCD guy is the one who wrote this). All of them were fantastic and really drove the point home in most cases. Highly recommend picking up a print copy of this book instead of listening to the audiobook version, for the drawings alone.

Gavin

Completely rigorous whimsy, often the first time science has been applied to the thing at hand. Pure mind-candy - but, in the absence of real physics education, also improving. 

They are free here.

This book reminded me a lot of my physics classes, when I used to play out all kinds of silly "what if" scenarios with my classmates when the teacher was just lecturing boring stuff again. We got stuck in the approaches for the most part back then.

This book, however, takes it up a few notches. Scenarios are not only scientifically comprehensible, but often also further effects and extremes, if the topic is spun to infinity.

Sometimes this gets a little too absurd and silly, but that can be gotten over, especially if you read the book in the hospital, as I did, and can work through the entertaining questions, which are usually 5-10 pages each, bit by bit.

Another book by Randall Munroe is already on order - What If 2 will surely follow. 

Nick Bicko

This book reminded me a lot of my physics classes, when I used to play out all kinds of silly "what if" scenarios with my classmates when the teacher was just lecturing boring stuff again. We got stuck in the approaches for the most part back then.

This book, however, takes it up a few notches. Scenarios are not only scientifically comprehensible, but often also further effects and extremes, if the topic is spun to infinity.

Sometimes this gets a little too absurd and silly, but that can be gotten over, especially if you read the book in the hospital, as I did, and can work through the entertaining questions, which are usually 5-10 pages each, bit by bit.

Another book by Randall Munroe is already on order - What If 2 will surely follow. 

Shona Tiger

Loved the way it explained everything simply and was interesting x

Alice Hunkin

Aditi

If I wasn't grinning while reading it, I was laughing out loud. :D Just read it. :D

Cindy Lieberman

If you’ve wondered if a raw steak would cook upon reentering our atmosphere, if one could live on an asteroid like The Little Prince, or what it would be like to “collect” all the elements of the Periodic Table, you’ll want to read this book - a collection of questions posed on the author’s website. With serious science and math chops and a sense of humor, he tackles absurd questions (or not) and gets us to think more broadly about what we can know (or in many cases, estimate).

Julia Lotz

Inhalt: Wirklich wissenschaftliche Antworten auf absurde hypothetische Fragen
Wenn xkcd.com einen neuen Science Cartoon postet, vibriert das Internet. Sein Blog"what if", auf dem der Physiker Randall Munroe jede Woche bizarre Fragen mit exakter Wissenschaft und genialen Strichmännchen beantwortet, ist Kult. Wie lange würde es dauern, bis wir merken würden, dass sich der Erdumfang verändert? 

° Hätten wir genug Energie, um die ganze Weltbevölkerung von der Erde wegzubefördern?
° Wann (wenn überhaupt) wird Facebook mehr Profile von Toten als von Lebenden enthalten?
° Wenn man eine zufällige Nummer wählt und "Gesundheit!" sagt, wie hoch ist die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass der Angerufene tatsächlich gerade geniest hat?
 (Quelle: Verlag)
Meine Meinung: Nachdem ich gehört habe, dass Randall Munroe ein Buch rausbringt war mir sofort klar: Das musste ich haben. Bekannt war er mir von xkcd und ich als heimlicher Nerd habe seine Seite unheimlich gerne gelesen bzw. lese sie auch heute noch. Ich liebe die Mischung aus Naturwissenschaft und Humor, die Munroe auf eine Art und Weise rüberbringen kann, wie kein anderer sonst.
What if? ist eine Sammlung von absurden Fragen, die Randall Munroe Tag für Tag zugeschickt bekommt und auf wissenschaftliche und lustige Weise beantwortet. Wie unrealistisch und komisch diese Fragen sind spielt keine Rolle. Alles, was beantwortet werden kann, wird beantwortet und das auch noch auf wissenschaftliche und vollkommen korrekte Art. So auch Fragen, wie oben im Klappentext beschrieben oder meine Lieblingsfrage: Wie viel MACHT-Energie kann Yoda erzeugen? (Ja, hier kommt natürlich der Star Wars Fan durch.) Die Erklärungen sind natürlich gefüllt mit vielen lustigen Stellen und Kommentaren seitens Randall Munroes und vielen typischen Illustrationen von ihm. In What if? wird seine Website zum Buch und ich habe jede einzelne Seite sehr genossen.
Natürlich sollte man eines Bedenken: So lustig das Buch auch ist, es ist Non-Fiction, es ist ein Sachbuch. Sogar ein sehr wissenschaftliches Sachbuch, denn seine Erklärungen sind belegt und absolut nachvollziehbar und auch richtig. Erwartet man ein spannungsgeladenes und actionreiches Buch ist man auf jeden Fall an der falschen Stelle. Auch ich habe das Buch nicht aneinanderhängend von vorne bis hinten durchgelesen sondern habe immer, wenn ich Lust hatte ein oder mehrere Kapitel gelesen. Dass es nicht actionreich ist, heißt aber noch lange nicht, dass es nicht interessant wäre. Tatsächlich konnte mich das Buch in manchen Situationen mehr fesseln, als mein aktuelles Fiction-Buch. Für das Lesen und Verstehen ist jedoch Konzentration absolut notwendig und deshalb fällt es als Lektüre für abends im Bett leider (zumindest für mich) weg. 
Empfehlen kann ich das Buch vielen Leuten. Ihr solltet natürlich ein grundlegendes Interesse an den Naturwissenschaften mitbringen. Als starke Verfechter des Spruches „Mathe ist ein A*** und Physik sein kleiner Bruder“ solltet ihr dann doch lieber die Finger von dem Buch lassen. Das wird euch dann doch eher langweilen. Zurückschrecken solltet ihr allerdings nicht, wenn ihr nicht die Besten in Mathe und anderen Naturwissenschaften seid. Denn das Buch kann euch vielleicht sogar mit den wirklich spannenden Themen für die Fächer interessieren. Und an alle Naturwissenschafts-Begeisterten und Mit-Nerds da draußen: Absolute Leseempfehlung!
Bewertung: What if? bekommt von mir eine absolute Leseempfehlung. Allen Nerds und Fans von xkcd kann ich es ohnehin empfehlen, denn das Buch ist wirklich die buchgewordene Website und auf jeden Fall genauso gut und empfehlenswert. Außerdem glaube ich, dass viele, die mit Mathe und Naturwissenschaften noch nicht so Dicke sind, mit der humorvollen und komisch trockenen Art, vielleicht sogar Interesse an den Fächern und an den Themen finden. What if? verdient von mir 5 von 5 Füchschen.
Vielen herzlichen Dank an knaus Verlag für das tolle *Rezensionsexemplar.

Yasser Yahia

A very good simple informative book with a fair amount of the author's sense of humor. I personally enjoyed the book more than I expected and learned about few stuff here and there!

Aditi Verma

What If? Was Wäre Wenn?

Sonja H

Ein tolles Buch für alle Neugierigen und solche, die gute Todesszenarien zu schätzen wissen :) 
Der Autor hat sehr gewissenhaft recherchiert und verpackt seine Erkenntnisse amüsant und mit lustigen Zeichnungen. 
Ein Buch zum Mehrfachlesen!

Carlos Becker

Very good read of things I would probably never really use... unless maybe small talk.

From the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, hilarious and informative answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask 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 an enormous, dedicated following, as do his deeply researched answers to his fans’ strangest questions. The queries he receives range from merely odd to downright diabolical: • What if I took a swim in a spent-nuclear-fuel pool? • Could you build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns? • What if a Richter 15 earthquake hit New York City? • Are fire tornadoes possible? His responses are masterpieces of clarity and wit, gleefully and accurately explaining everything from the relativistic effects of a baseball pitched at near the speed of light to the many horrible ways you could die while building a periodic table out of all the actual elements. The book features new and never-before-answered questions, along with the most popular answers from the xkcd website. What If? is an informative feast for xkcd fans and anyone who loves to ponder the hypothetical.

Radimir Bitsov

Great book for those curious about the world (universe) around us. You will learn some really cool facts presented in an enjoyable and fun form which is a trademark for the author's xkcd comics series.

Omar AlHashmi

Great book. Delivers exactly what you would expect from the title. The great thing is that each answer is not drawn out so much, so you are never constantly bored. Even if you find a question uninteresting, the author does a good job at making it entertaining. He goes into detail on some answers but not too much that it starts to get monotonous to read. All in all, it was a very enjoyable read.

Vedat Güven

Yazar NASA'da çalışan bir mühendis. Kendi web sitesine gelen alakasız sorulara (anlamsız değil ama) cevaplar veriyor, açıklamalar yapıyor. Nükleer atık havuzunda yüzersek ne olur? Dünya bir anda dönmeyi bırakıp durursa ne olur? Işık hızına yakın bir hızdaki beyzbol topuna vurursan ne olur? İnsanların ruh ikizini bulma ihtimali nedir? Herkes Ay'a lazer pointer tutarsa, Ay aydınlanır mı? Tüm dünya insanları dar bir alanda toplanıp aynı anda sıçrarsa ne olur? Ve buna benzer onlarca soruya biraz esprili, biraz bilimsel biraz da şaşırtıcı cevaplar buluyorsunuz kitapta.

What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

Reviews