What if? 2 : additional serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions

First Title Value for Searching:

Personal Author:

Munroe, Randall

Physical Description:

ix, 354 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Summary:

"The millions of people around the world who loved What If? still have questions, and those questions are getting stranger. Thank goodness xkcd creator Randall Munroe is here to help. Planning to ride a fire pole from the Moon back to Earth? The hardest part is sticking the landing. Hoping to cool the atmosphere by opening everyone's freezer door at the same time? Maybe it's time for a brief introduction to thermodynamics. Want to know what would happen if you rode a helicopter blade, built a billion-story building, made a lava lamp out of lava, or jumped on a geyser as it erupted? Okay, if you insist. Before you go on a cosmic road trip, feed the residents of New York City to a T. rex, or fill every church with bananas, be sure to consult this practical guide for impractical ideas. Unfazed by absurdity, Munroe consults the latest research on everything from swing-set physics to airliner catapult design to answer his listeners' questions, clearly and concisely. As he consistently demonstrates, you can learn a lot from examining how the world might work in very specific extreme circumstances."--Provided by publisher.

Subject Term:

Science -- Miscellanea.

Physics

Publication Info:

New York : Riverhead Books/Peguin RandomHouse, [2022]

Subject:

Science -- Miscellanea.

Physics

Natural science

Natural sciences

Science of science

Sciences

Natural philosophy

Philosophy, Natural

SAILS ISBN:

9780525537113

Available:

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Summary

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!

An NPR Best Book of 2022

"The questions throughout What If? 2 are equal parts brilliant, gross, and wonderfully absurd and the answers are thorough, deeply researched, and great fun. . . . Science isn't easy, but in Munroe's capable hands, it surely can be fun." -- TIME

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of What If? and How To answers more of the weirdest questions you never thought to ask

The millions of people around the world who read and loved What If? still have questions, and those questions are getting stranger. Thank goodness xkcd creator Randall Munroe is here to help. Planning to ride a fire pole from the Moon back to Earth? The hardest part is sticking the landing. Hoping to cool the atmosphere by opening everyone's freezer door at the same time? Maybe it's time for a brief introduction to thermodynamics. Want to know what would happen if you rode a helicopter blade, built a billion-story building, made a lava lamp out of lava, or jumped on a geyser as it erupted? Okay, if you insist.

Before you go on a cosmic road trip, feed the residents of New York City to a T. rex, or fill every church with bananas, be sure to consult this practical guide for impractical ideas. Unfazed by absurdity, Munroe consults the latest research on everything from swing-set physics to airliner catapult-design to answer his readers' questions, clearly and concisely, with illuminating and occasionally terrifying illustrations. As he consistently demonstrates, you can learn a lot from examining how the world might work in very specific extreme circumstances.

Reviews (2)

Kirkus Review

Former NASA roboticist Munroe continues his quest to answer the world's unlikeliest questions. Assuming you had enough fuel, how long would it take you to drive to the edge of the observable universe? If you traveled at 65 mph, writes the author, "it will take you 480,000,000,000,000,000 years…to get there, or 35 million times the current age of the universe." How Munroe arrives at such calculations isn't always clear, and his math doesn't always show the work, but roll with it. He estimates that a hungry T. rex set loose on the streets of New York might be placated with 80 hamburgers--and if the dinosaur decides to devour a friend of yours instead of the proffered treat, "anyway, hey, you have 80 burgers." Speaking of eating, can a person eat a cloud? No, writes the author, not unless you can squeeze the air out of it, and never mind whether the water within the cloud is potable. Munroe takes clear delight in his odd investigations--e.g., whether a person--or a vampire, maybe--can get drunk drinking a drunk person's blood. The answer has to do with the dilution of ethanol, but Munroe pauses to counsel that it's a very bad idea to drink someone else's blood in the first instance: "I'm not a doctor, and I try not to give medical advice in my books. However, I will confidently say that you shouldn't drink the blood of someone with a viral hemorrhagic fever." You've got to like a book that blends deep dives into such matters as the nature of black holes and the mathematics of genealogy with handy pop-culture references--as when Munroe brightly likens the unfortunate Greek king Sisyphus to Hollywood stalwart Dwayne Johnson, because, of course, rocks are involved in both cases. A delight for science geeks with a penchant for oddball thought experiments. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal Review

A follow-up to xkcd cartoonist Munroe's best-seller What If?, this second volume continues answering science questions from readers around the world. Most of the questions are ridiculous but the answers are very serious. How many humans would a T. rex need to consume to get its needed calories? What would happen if Earth's rotation sped up to make a day last one second? If you rolled a snowball from the top of Mount Everest, how big would it be by the time it reached the bottom? Munroe breaks down these questions and does the research to actually answer them. Part of the fun is how he breaks down the components of the question to arrive at an answer. Wil Wheaton has the cred to narrate this as it should be read. He takes each question as seriously as Monroe, but adds sly, tongue-in-cheek highlights to make listening an absolute pleasure. The print version does include some cartoons, but the audio is a treasure of its own. VERDICT Libraries who serve any nerds should snap up this gem. Great on its own, and also a wonderful accompaniment to the print version of Munroe's delightful book.--Christa Van Herreweghe

Introduction	p. ix
1 Soupiter	p. 1
2 Helicopter Ride	p. 6
3 Dangerously Cold	p. 11
4 Ironic Vaporization	p. 16
5 Cosmic Road Trip	p. 22
6 Pigeon Chair	p. 26
S Short Answers #1	p. 30
7 T. Rex Calories	p. 37
8 Geyser	p. 40
9 Pew, Pew, Pew	p. 43
10 Reading Every Book	p. 47
W Weird & Worrying #1	p. 51
11 Banana Church	p. 52
12 Catch!	p. 55
13 Lose Weight the Slow and Incredibly Difficult Way	p. 59
14 Paint the Earth	p. 66
15 Jupiter Comes to Town	p. 70
16 Star Sand	p. 74
17 Swing Set	p. 78
18 Airliner Catapult	p. 83
S Short Answers #2	p. 88
19 Slow Dinosaur Apocalypse	p. 98
20 Elemental Worlds	p. 103
21 One-Second Day	p. 108
22 Billion-Story Building	p. 111
23 $2 Undecillion Lawsuit	p. 120
24 Star Ownership	p. 124
25 Tire Rubber	p. 128
26 Plastic Dinosaurs	p. 131
S Short Answers #3	p. 135
27 Suction Aquarium	p. 143
28 Earth Eye	p. 149
29 Build Rome in a Day	p. 154
30 Mariana Trench Tube	p. 159
31 Expensive Shoebox	p. 164
32 MRI Compass	p. 168
33 Ancestor Fraction	p. 172
34 Bird Car	p. 176
35 No-Rules NASCAR	p. 180
W Weird & Worrying #2	p. 185
36 Vacuum Tube Smartphone	p. 186
37 Laser Umbrella	p. 192
38 Eat a Cloud	p. 195
39 Tall Sunsets	p. 199
40 Lava Lamp	p. 202
41 Sisyphean Refrigerators	p. 206
42 Blood Alcohol	p. 210
43 Basketball Earth	p. 214
44 Spiders vs. the Sun	p. 217
45 Inhale a Person	p. 220
46 Candy Crush Lightning	p. 223
S Short Answers #4	p. 226
47 Toasty Warm	p. 234
48 Proton Earth, Electron Moon	p. 236
49 Eyeball	p. 241
50 Japan Runs an Errand	p. 244
51 Fire from Moonlight	p. 249
52 Read All the Laws	p. 255
W Weird & Worrying #3	p. 262
53 Saliva Pool	p. 263
54 Snowball	p. 268
55 Niagara Straw	p. 272
56 Walking Backward in Time	p. 277
57 Ammonia Tube	p. 284
58 Earth-Moon Fire Pole	p. 287
S Short Answers #5	p. 298
59 Global Snow	p. 305
60 Dog Overload	p. 308
61 Into the Sun	p. 314
62 Sunscreen	p. 318
63 Walking on the Sun	p. 323
64 Lemon Drops and Gumdrops	p. 329
Acknowledgments	p. 335
References	p. 337
Index	p. 349

Available:

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Summary

Summary

Reviews (2)

Kirkus Review

Library Journal Review

Table of Contents