What If?
By Randall Munroe
Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.
Summary of What If? book by Randall Munroe
Providing actual answers to people’s ponderings, whether it be on various scientific and mathematical aspects of the world, or situations that humans will probably never be in, but that are fascinating to wonder about all the same.
Chapters in What If? book summary
What do you get from this book? Contemplations on questions you didn’t know you had
Humans have impacted the planet in many ways, but in these two imagined conditions, the outcomes would vary
There are many forces outside our control, including the weather, which could change the world as we know it
Without oceans of water on planet Earth, or without the Sun, we wouldn’t exist to try to illuminate the moon
Transportation, whether underwater, in the sky, or across space, is often fodder for creative ideas
We can only imagine what a city like New York would look like at different periods throughout history
Thinking about how people might live differently can solidify concepts about our existence
Call people morbid, but many of them wonder what the destruction of themselves or the world would look like
A bridge out of LEGOs or a periodic table out of the actual elements are just some of the constructions people think about
From printers to social media, technology has changed our lives, but they could change even more with these scenarios
How fast, how far, how high, and how often are all questions raised around various situations
Summary of the key insights
Selected critiques in brief
Final word
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What If? — Book Summary Snapshot
Who should read What If? book
- mathematicians
- those with creative questions
- people interested in how reality could be different
- anyone who has ever wondered “what if…”
About the author of What If?
Randall Munroe
Randall Munroe used to work on robots at NASA Langley Research Center, but he left that lucrative job to draw stick figures instead. He created the comic xkcd and as people began sending him hypothetical questions, he used his background in physics and science to answer them. Munroe has now published two books of the answers, What If? and What If? 2, as well as How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems.
Books similar to What If?
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Barbara Oakley
How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra). The Penguin Group, 2014 .
Ian Stewart
17 Equations That Changed the World. Basic Books, 2012.
Richard Dawkins
How We Know What’s Really True. Free Press, 2011.
Topics related to What If? book
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