2022; 334 pages. Book 2 (out of 2) in the “What If?” series.
New Author? : No. Genres : Humorous
Science; Physics; XKCD; Non-Fiction. Overall
Rating: 9½*/10.
A few questions that might
cross your mind some night when it’s 3 AM in the morning and you can’t sleep:
01. What would
happen if the Solar System was filled with soup out to Jupiter?
06. How many
pigeons would it require in order to lift the average person and a launch chair
to the height of Australia’s Q1 skyscraper?
38.
Could a person eat a whole cloud?
56. What if you
decided to walk from Austin, Texas, to New York City, but every step you take
takes you back 30 days?
64. What if all
the raindrops were lemon drops and gumdrops?
What? You say you’d love to know the answers to
these, but don’t want to suffer from insomnia while trying to figure them
out? Then pick up Randall Munroe’s new
book, What If? 2.
What’s To Like...
What If? 2
is the long-awaited sequel to Randall Munroe’s fantastic 2014 best-seller What If?.
I’ve read it, loved it, and it is reviewed here. Randall Munroe is also the creator of the
comic strip XKCD, which caters to the geek audience, of which I am a part.
What If? 2 contains
discussions of 64 mind-boggling questions like those shown above, plus five
sections of “Short Answers” and three
sections labeled “Weird and Worrying”. There’s also a list, aptly titled “Things You Should Not Do”, that gets
periodically updated throughout the book based on some of the questions, which
advises you not to do things such as: pump
ammonia into your abdomen, eat meat from rabid animals, and perform your own laser eye surgery. There are numerous as well [citation needed] inserts; they are
hilarious.
ANAICT, the questions come
from letters written by fans to the author, and he even lists the inquirers at
the start of each discussion. His answers to the 64 main questions average about 5 pages each, but each one contains several witty drawings in “XKCD style”, so the five pages are actually quick reads.
I loved the innovative ways
the author used to give valid answers to the absurdly-conceived questions. For instance, how would you approach a
problem such as “If house dust comprises up to
80 percent dead skin, how many people worth of skin does a person consume in a
lifetime?” (Question 45).
Randall Munroe doesn’t pretend that he already knows the answers to such
queries, and frequently mentions the experts he consulted.
As anticipated, What If? 2
is also a trivia buff’s delight. It was
fun to see our summers here in Phoenix get duly cited for their incredible
heat. I smiled because I’d already read
about the importance of Lagrange Points,
but I admit I’d never heard of the “glass
beaches of Vladisvostok”. Google-image
them, the photos are amazing.
FWIW, I read What
If? 2 in segments of 15-30 minutes, which is also how I read books of
poetry. I’m sure it’s possible to read
all 334 pages in one sitting, but if I did that, the questions-&-answers would all start to blur together after a while.
Ratings…
Amazon: 4.8*/5, based on 2,189 ratings
and 146 reviews.
Goodreads: 4.40*/5,
based on 6,714
ratings and 816 reviews
Excerpts...
The 39,000 McDonald’s restaurants worldwide sell
something like 18 billion hamburger patties per year, for an average of 1,250
burgers per restaurant per day. Those
1,250 burgers contain about 600,000 calories, which means that each T.rex only
needs about 80 hamburgers per day to survive, and one McDonald’s could support
more than a dozen tyrannosaurs on hamburgers alone.
If you live in New York and you see a
T.rex, don’t worry. You don’t have to
choose a friend to sacrifice; just order 80 burgers instead.
And then if the T.rex goes for your friend,
anyway, hey, you have 80 burgers. (pg. 39)
The average kid produces about half a liter
of saliva per day, according to the paper “Estimation of the Total Saliva
Produced Per Day in Five-Year-Old Children,” which I like to imagine was mailed
to the Archives of Oral Biology in a slightly sticky, dripping envelope.
A 5-year-old probably produces
proportionally less saliva than a larger adult.
On the other hand, I’m not comfortable betting that anyone
produces more drool than a little kid, so let’s be conservative and use the
paper’s figure. (…)
At
the rate of 500 ml per day from the paper, it would take you about a year to
fill a typical bathtub. (pg.
263)
In other words, your
aquarium could be destroyed by whale farts.
(pg. 148)
I didn’t find many nits to
pick with What If? 2. As expected, there's no cussing in it, let
alone any “adult situations” either implied or explicit.
About the worst I can think of is that, if
you aren’t science-oriented, some of the calculations used to determine the
answers in the book may seem a bit “physics-y”. I’m a chemist by trade, but if you saw my
GPAs for the high school and college physics classes I took (especially the ones that incorporated calculus into the
lessons), you’d understand why I am a bit thin-skinned when it comes to reading bunches of discussions involving physics.
To be fair, Randall Munroe
usually warns the reader when a calculation he uses is complicated and asks us to just
trust the answer. That may sound like a dose of risky blind faith, but rest assured, there will be readers of this book who are physics majors, who will double-check the calculations used, and will be ecstatically
vociferous if they catch a flaw.
What If? 2 was an
enlightening and entertaining read for me, from the beginning through the
end. You’ll learn a lot, and have a fun
time while doing so. This may motivate
me to read Randall Munroe’s companion book How To,
in the not-too-distant future.
9½ Stars. For the record, Question 64 listed above comes from the first line of a nursery song that can be found multiple times on YouTube, including one version by Barney the Dinosaur. I’d never heard of it. I must be getting old.
