What If? - Randall Munroe

   2014; 321 pages.  New Author? : Yes.    Genre : Non-Fiction; Science; XKCD; Reference; Science Humor.  Overall Rating : 10*/10.

    Even when I was a kid, I had a scientific mind.  I remember one question in particular that I read or heard somewhere:  What would happen if every person in China jumped up and down simultaneously?

   It sat in the backwaters of my mind for weeks.  I finally concluded that the answer is “nothing”, which is more or less correct, but for which my reasoning was quite wrong.  My conclusion was that it was simply impossible to synchronize every last Chinese citizen to leap into the air and come down at the same time, so the question is meaningless.  Hey, I was just a kid, but I still admire my logic. 

    Well, that question is addressed in Randall Munroe’s book, What If?, but he’s an adult with a degree in physics from Christopher Newport University, so you can expect that he investigates it much more thoroughly than I did.  Indeed, he ramps the whole concept up a notch or two, by rewording it as “What if you could gather everyone on Earth into one location and somehow have them simultaneously jump up and down at the same time?”

    That’s just one of 50+ absurd questions that is addressed here, in this case it's found in Everybody Jump (chapter 9).  Randall Munroe’s answer doesn’t exactly agree with mine, but his investigation runs a lot deeper.  So if you find yourself losing sleep over scientific conundrums like this (as a child, the author mused on: “which are there more of in the world – soft things or hard things?”) then you owe it to yourself to read this book.

What’s To Like...

    There are 69 chapters in What If?, which is an average of about 4½ pages per chapter.  57 of those chapters deal with individual, bizarre, tech-oriented questions submitted on Randall Munroe’s blog with his active encouragement.  The other 12 chapters interspersed throughout the book are titled “Weird (and Worrying) Questions from the What If? Box”, and contain questions that were too outrageous for even Munroe to respond to.

    Each chapter is a treat for anyone who’s an XKCD fan or has even a drop of geek blood in his veins.  My favorites, besides the aforementioned Chinese jumping poser, were:

01.  Global Windstorm.  What if the world suddenly stopped turning?

02.  Relativistic Baseball.  What if a pitcher threw a baseball at 90% of the speed of light?

05.  New York-style Time Machine.  What if we could time-travel, forward and back, from a spot in New York City?

09.  A Mole of Moles.  Because celebrating Mole Day (October 23) is something geeks like me do.

26.  Glass Half Empty.  What if “empty” meant “a perfect vacuum”?

28.  Alien Astronomers.  Are alien astronomers watching their skies for ET's too?

48.  Drain the Oceans.  What if we siphoned off the water in the oceans and shipped it off-planet?

53.  Random Sneeze Call.  What are the odds that answering the phone with, “God Bless You” is eerily timely?

59.  Facebook of the Dead.  What happens when most of the Facebook users are dead people?

    All of the answers are written with Randall Munroe’s XKCD wit and technical expertise, and each one also contains several of his stick-figure cartoons to amuse you and make the book a really quick read.  There’s an abundance of Discworld-esque footnotes; these are hilarious and function smoothly.  The Disclaimer and Intro are also worth reading.  And if you want a still deeper (and more serious) answer to any of the questions, there are Acknowledgements and References sections in the back.

    The book is a trivia buff’s delight.  I never knew that Helsinki has a natural underground level, but it’s an ideal place to be if you want to survive the world stopping spinning.  Other eye-openers:

    a. a Supersonic Omnidimensional Jet.

    b. Wookiepedia.

    c. SAT tests now have a writing section.  (who knew?!)

    d. how to make an underground shooting star.

    e. The Richter scale does not have limits of 0-10.

    f. The nine good things that would happen if the sun suddenly “went out”.

    g. Pangea had a predecessor; it was called Rodinia.

    h.  The Wow Signal.

Excerpts...

    There are a lot of problems with the concept of a single random soul mate.  As Tim Minchin put it in his song “If I Didn’t Have You”:

    Your love is one in a million;

    You couldn’t buy it at any price.

    But of the 9.999 hundred thousand other loves,

    Statistically, some of them would be equally nice.  (loc. 395)

    A magnitude 9 earthquake already measurably alters the rotation of the Earth; the two magnitude 9+ earthquakes this century both altered the length of the day by a tiny fraction of a second.

    A magnitude 15 earthquake would involve the release of almost 10³³ joules of energy, which is roughly the gravitational binding energy of the Earth.  To put it another way, the Death Star caused a magnitude 15 earthquake on Alderan.  (loc. 3712)

Kindle Details...

    What If? sells for $11.99, which is an average price for a science reference e-book.  This is presently Randall Munroe’s only science-oriented offering.   Its sequel, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems, is due to be published in September if this year.  Several other of his books, including one focusing on his comic strip, XKCD, are available, but only in printed versions.

If I had to bet on which one of us would still be around in a million years – primates, computers, or ants – I know who I’d pick.  (loc. 1356)

    If you still aren’t thoroughly sold on the merits of What If?, here’s a couple of trivia question that are posed in the book.  Answers are in the “Comments”.

    a. What is the rainiest place in the US?  (Useless hint: I’ve been there)

    b. Of the 28 people killed by lightning in 2012, how many were standing under a tree at the time?

    c. Which state has the most planes fly over it, meaning those planes don’t take off or land there?  (And consider how you’d even research this question.)

    d. Which state has the most planes fly under it, meaning those planes are flying in airspace directly on the opposite side of the globe.

    10 Stars.  I thoroughly enjoyed every page of What If?, and can’t wait for the sequel to come out.  Subtract ½ star  if you have no interest in sciency matters, but you’ll still enjoy this book for its laugh-out-loud XKCD humor.