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
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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
Reinforce what you learned from What If?
Mind Map
What If?
The Sun Disappearing+
Little Prince Planet Physics+
Printing Wikipedia+
Eradicating the Common Cold+
Finding a Single Soulmate+
Human vs. Computer Processing+
Guessing the SAT+
Facebook's Dead Demographics+
Core Philosophy+
Quiz — Test Your Understanding
Question 1 of 8
What is mentioned as a surprising economic benefit if the Sun were to suddenly go out?
Question 2 of 8
If you lived on a tiny, super-dense planet like the one in 'The Little Prince', how would gravity physically feel different?
Question 3 of 8
What is the primary reason that live-printing the English Wikipedia would be an unsustainable project?
Question 4 of 8
Why might eradicating the common cold through a global human quarantine be a bad idea?
Question 5 of 8
If every person had exactly one random soulmate, what would be the biggest practical hurdle to finding them?
Question 6 of 8
How does the manual calculating power of the entire human population compare to modern electronics?
Question 7 of 8
What does the book conclude about the probability of a student getting a perfect SAT score simply by guessing?
Question 8 of 8
What primary factor will determine exactly when Facebook has more profiles of dead people than living people?
What If? — Full Chapter Overview
- 1Recommendation
- 2If the Sun went out, we would gain unexpected benefits in many parts of life.
- 3The tiny planet from The Little Prince would have astonishing gravitational quirks.
- 4Six printers could live-update a printed English Wikipedia – but at a huge cost.
- 5The common cold might vanish if everyone isolated for weeks – but the price is too high.
- 6If every person had a single random soulmate, the world would be desolate.
- 7An ordinary cell phone outperforms humanity’s combined processing power – though people excel elsewhere.
- 8Perfectly guessing every SAT multiple-choice question is essentially impossible.
- 9Sometime 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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