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What If?

What If?

By Randall Munroe

Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.

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17 mins read

14 Key insights

A brief summary of What If?

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.

Key insights in What If?

1
What do you get from this book? Contemplations on questions you didn’t know you had
2
Humans have impacted the planet in many ways, but in these two imagined conditions, the outcomes would vary
3
There are many forces outside our control, including the weather, which could change the world as we know it
4
Without oceans of water on planet Earth, or without the Sun, we wouldn’t exist to try to illuminate the moon
5
Transportation, whether underwater, in the sky, or across space, is often fodder for creative ideas
6
We can only imagine what a city like New York would look like at different periods throughout history
7
Thinking about how people might live differently can solidify concepts about our existence
8
Call people morbid, but many of them wonder what the destruction of themselves or the world would look like
9
A bridge out of LEGOs or a periodic table out of the actual elements are just some of the constructions people think about
10
From printers to social media, technology has changed our lives, but they could change even more with these scenarios
11
How fast, how far, how high, and how often are all questions raised around various situations
12
Summary of the key insights
13
Selected critiques in brief
14
Final word

Who should read What If?

Scientists • mathematicians • dreamers • 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 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.

author avatar

Randall Munroe

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