If You're Curious About These Questions...
You should listen to this audiobook
- Have you ever wondered what would happen to the planet if every person on Earth jumped at the exact same time?
- Did you know that attempting to build a physical periodic table out of the actual elements would result in a series of increasingly lethal disasters?
- What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light—would it be a home run, or something much more explosive?
Listen to What If? — Free Audiobook
Key Takeaways from What If?
- Discover how applying real scientific theories to absurd, childlike questions reveals deeply researched and highly entertaining insights about the universe.
- Learn why the Sun suddenly going dark would actually prevent trillion-dollar solar storm damages and boost the global economy, right before freezing us all to death.
- Understand the bizarre gravitational properties of super-dense, miniature planets, where your feet would feel four times heavier than your head and a light sprint could launch you into space.
- Find out how live-printing every single English Wikipedia edit would require just six standard printers, but would squander half a million dollars on ink and paper in mere months.
- Explore the scientific feasibility of eradicating the common cold through a temporary global quarantine, and see why the resulting economic halt makes it an impractical solution.
Learning Tools
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What If? — Full Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: Recommendation
Chapter 2: If the Sun went out, we would gain unexpected benefits in many parts of life.
Chapter 3: The tiny planet from The Little Prince would have astonishing gravitational quirks.
Chapter 4: Six printers could live-update a printed English Wikipedia – but at a huge cost.
Chapter 5: The common cold might vanish if everyone isolated for weeks – but the price is too high.
Chapter 6: If every person had a single random soulmate, the world would be desolate.
Chapter 7: An ordinary cell phone outperforms humanity’s combined processing power – though people excel elsewhere.
Chapter 8: Perfectly guessing every SAT multiple-choice question is essentially impossible.
Chapter 9: Sometime in the 2060s or the 2130s, Facebook will host more dead than living profiles.
What If? Summary & Overview
In What If? (2014), Randall Munroe presents earnest, thoroughly researched answers to absurd, hypothetical questions in a highly entertaining and digestible format. Munroe serves up the most popular answers from queries he received through his What If? blog, along with a host of new, delightful, mind-bending questions and answers.
Who Should Listen to What If??
- Anyone who loves to ponder the hypothetical
- Anyone interested the oddities of math, science, and technology
- Any fan of Randall Munroe’s webcomic, xkcd
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