Author: Randall Munroe
Genres: Humor, Entertainment, Science
Book Review
What If? Is a fast, engaging read. Subsequently, you become accustomed to Munroe’s rapid-fire delivery and hilariously nonchalant throw-away lines, you are detached to remove tons of odd journeys with him and giggle while you read. Read on and you will learn how.
Thither is a kind of joy in getting actual answers to the admittedly ridiculous questions Munroe is sent every day. For example, yes, you could swim in a pool of spent nuclear fuel rods. In fact, do it properly and you’d actually get less radiation than someone sticking out along the airfoil! And if a physicist pessimist made a glass literally half-empty, the glass would rocket itself into your roof, which Munroe examines millisecond by millisecond.
The charm of What If? Lies in the ease Munroe are jumping past intensely interesting conclusions and onto his next thought, tangent, or event. It’s as if Munroe is an unseen stage technician pulling back the curtain the answers were always there, we simply asked somebody who recognized how to show us. Even he looks surprised at what he sees. These quibbles don’t take away from the love and wonder for math and science that Munroe expertly channels.
Each page will treat old and new audiences alike to delightful tidbits of science that shake out from Munroe’s analyses. How about that you could feasibly make a jet pack out of downwards-firing machine guns? The outlandish and often disturbing questions that Munroe doesn’t answer might be even more fun to learn, which he features in a handful of Weird Questions from the What If Inbox sections. The inner of the book’s jacket is actually a full-size infographic of what the world would look like if the oceans were drained from the tail end of the Marianas Trench.
The cover of the book has no blurbs or praise from other authors it’s a collection of things that you might desire to know before purchasing the script. I stated that I had to trust Munroe because the first thing strikes you about his witty, concise prose is that although he evidently has enough intellectual chops to explain the several scientific concepts tackled in his questions, What If? Is not a textbook. Munroe simply states that when giving a baseball at light-speed there would be an x-ray Shockwave expanding outwards from a fireball of plasma, and promptly moves along. He is answering the doubt, after all, only if you are looking for classroom-style descriptions of what Munroe is talking about, you’re out of luck.
But that is the best piece. What If? Is in this way perfectly accessible and inaccessible light enough to entertain you, but dense enough to throw you down a rabbit hole of fascinating science one brief chapter at a time. If you are willing to go along with Munroe’s assumptions, guesstimates, and caveats, you are in for a wild intellectual ride.