The full title is “What If: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions” and it is the most fun and most enjoyable non-fiction book i’ve ever read.
The author (Randall Munroe) is the creator and writer of the comic XKCD which is extremely geeky. The title is a very good description of what the book is about and the word ‘absurd’ is used with good reason. Here are just a few of the questions which are answered in a very scientific and fun way in this book:
What would happen if everyone on earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same instant? (I won’t spoil the answer to this one, you need to read the book).
Is it possible to build a jetpack using downward firing machine guns? This is really a cool question because the answer is YES!. It takes four pages to explain how and why.
If everyone on the planet stayed away from each other for a couple of weeks, wouldn’t the common cold be wiped out? Yeah, there’s no way i’m giving away the answer to this. You’ve GOT to read this book.
How much force power can Yoda output? A vital question which every Star Wars fan has wondered.
How many Lego bricks would it take to build a bridge from London to New York? Have that many Lego bricks been manufactured? This one is harder than you might think, because you would have to solve a few design and structural problems as well as a way to make footings for the bridge, but who wouldn’t want to build a bridge across the Atlantic out of Legos?
There are more than 60 questions like this, each taking between 2 and 5 pages to answer. They are all real questions submitted by real people to Randall Munroe’s web site XKCD. In addition, there are one page sections throughout the book of questions he does not answer, presented just so you can see the types of very scary questions that people have asked him. There is a short section with 5 questions about lightning! The science and math used throughout the book is accurate, but written in a way that is very accessible for the average person. You do not need to be a physicist to follow the details. Most importantly the entire book is written with a very wry, tongue in cheek humor that keeps it entertaining. Like i said, this is the most fun non-fiction book i’ve ever read and i highly recommend it to everyone.
This is a fun book. If I thought middle school or high school I would use this for a question a day. I would have the class come up with their own answers in a journal and then have them compare their answers to the book!