What If?
1980
- mathematics
- statistics
- miscellanea
- science
- questions and answers
- physics
- long now manual for civilization
- science / physics
- science, miscellanea
- home economics
The story
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.
What it’s like
Bright, airy, cheerfully cluttered: the pages are white and generous, with small stick-figure cartoons tucked into the margins and full-page diagrams that read like whiteboard sketches drawn in a good mood. The prose is conversational and crisp, a friendly voice walking you through absurd premises with a straight face, so each answer builds like a patient lecture that keeps undercutting itself with jokes and sudden catastrophe. Its vibe is playful curiosity with a dry grin, the kind of book you dip into one question at a time: a lazy Sunday with coffee, a long train ride, or a sleepless night when you want to be entertained without feeling lost. The intensity sits in the imagination rather than the page: there is plenty of cheerful mass destruction, nuclear blasts and robot uprisings described in matter-of-fact numbers, but nothing graphic, no gore, no real cruelty, and the tone stays light. Pacing is brisk and modular, each question a self-contained burst of reasoning that ends on a punchline. It suits readers who enjoy math and science without the homework feel, and anyone who likes their curiosity silly, precise, and a little bit doomed.
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