What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

by Randall Munroe

Narrated by Wil Wheaton

Unabridged — 6 hours, 36 minutes

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

by Randall Munroe

Narrated by Wil Wheaton

Unabridged — 6 hours, 36 minutes

Audiobook (Digital)

$16.95
(Not eligible for purchase using B&N Audiobooks Subscription credits)

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Overview

From the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd comes this hilarious and informative book of answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask.

Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe's iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have a large and passionate following. Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions. What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent of the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? If there were a robot apocalypse, how long would humanity last?

In pursuit of answers, Munroe runs computer simulations, pores over stacks of declassified military research memos, solves differential equations, and consults with nuclear reactor operators. His responses are masterpieces of clarity and hilarity, complemented by signature xkcd comics. They often predict the complete annihilation of humankind, or at least a really big explosion.

The book features new and never-before-answered questions, along with updated and expanded versions of the most popular answers from the xkcd website. What If? will be required reading for xkcd fans and anyone who loves to ponder the hypothetical.


Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

What If? maintains a delightfully free-wheeling tone throughout, especially when complicated calculations lead to whimsical results...Despite all the hard facts and gigantic numbers, it never feels like a textbook—and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to enjoy it. A.”  — Entertainment Weekly

“Catchy and approachable...There’s plenty of scientific rigor behind his elaborate explanations but he punctuates them with sly humor and winningly primitive cartoon diagrams...A cut above so many popular science and technology books.”  — NPR.org  

“Consistently fascinating and entertaining...Munroe leavens the hard science with whimsical touches...An illuminating handbook of methods of reasoning.”  — Wall Street Journal

“It’s fun to watch as Munroe tackles each question and examines every possible complication with nerdy and methodical aplomb, his distinctive scribblings providing clever running commentary of peanut-gallery jokes as his train of thought (sometimes) happily derails. The delightfully demented What If? is the most fun you can have with math and science, short of becoming your own evil genius...We feel the tug of Munroe’s playful yet existentially-tinged worldview, and all that geek logic and number-crunching becomes unexpectedly poignant.”  — Boston Globe

“Munroe has hit on a wonderful form of science and engineering communication that can do so much—extolling the value of analytical thinking, examining data, and doing back-of-the-envelope calculations—while entertaining readers at the same time… an incredibly fun book with quirky, hand-drawn pictures.”  — American Scientist

OCTOBER 2014 - AudioFile

Who better than Wil Wheaton, formerly of “Star Trek,” to narrate this romp through the world of Randall Munroe—physicist, roboticist, and editor of the website xkcd? This collection of eccentric questions with detailed answers affords a refreshing outlook on our world. Wheaton’s ambitious performance meshes perfectly with the perspectives and humor of the author. Missing from the audio are the signature stick-figure cartoons from the printed book and website, but Wheaton’s outstanding inflections, pacing, cadence, and timing more than compensate for the loss. So if you want to be thoroughly entertained while discovering what would happen if the world suddenly stopped spinning or a drain appeared in the bottom of the ocean, this audiobook deserves space on your listening device. M.L.R. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID: 2940169580204
Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date: 09/02/2014
Edition description: Unabridged
Sales rank: 1,190,558
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