The creator of the incredibly popular webcomic xkcd presents his heavily researched answers to his fans' oddest questions, including “What if I took a swim in a spent-nuclear-fuel pool?” and “Could you build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns?” 100,000 first printing.

Warning This is an independent addition to What If, meant to enhance your experience of the original book. If you have not yet bought the original copy, make sure to purchase it before buying this unofficial summary from aBookaDay. ANALYSIS *The questions in these sections are some of the strangest the author has received. In response, the author provides a humorous cartoon to both answer and acknowledge the absurdity of these questions. These questions are not covered in the following summary as the responses are purely visual. OVERVIEW This review of What If: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe provides a chapter by chapter detailed summary followed by an analysis and critique of the strengths and weaknesses of the book. The main theme explored in the book is how we can use science as a way to answer some of life's strangest and most unanswerable questions. Using data gathered from various sources such as clinical studies, scientific journal articles, and interviews with top scientific and analytical minds, the author is able to a provide answers to his audience's most absurd questions. The central thesis of the work is that any question humans have ever had about the way the world works or possible ramifications if the world stopped working the way we expect it to can all be answered through scientific means. Munroe takes each question from his audience and thoroughly examines it-mostly reserving judgement-and attempts to find the best answer possible. In some cases, he provides several different answers, and in others even provides answers to questions that the audience did not ask, but are related to the subject at hand. What makes his responses unique is that he relies on humor (and cartoons) to explain even the most difficult concepts and this allows for his answers to be easily understood by all of his audience, even those with no scientific background. Randall Munroe is the writer and creator of the web comic xkcd and has written a previous book of the same title. He worked at NASA as a roboticist until October of 2006 when he became a professional web comic artist full time. What If? is the result of his popular web comic and a project inspired by it where he asked users to post absurd math and physics related questions. He currently resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Available on PC, Mac, smart phone, tablet or Kindle device. (c) 2015 All Rights Reserved

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! "The questions throughout What If? 2 are equal parts brilliant, gross, and wonderfully absurd and the answers are thorough, deeply researched, and great fun. . . . Science isn’t easy, but in Munroe’s capable hands, it surely can be fun." —TIME The #1 New York Times bestselling author of What If? and How To answers more of the weirdest questions you never thought to ask The millions of people around the world who read and loved What If? still have questions, and those questions are getting stranger. Thank goodness xkcd creator Randall Munroe is here to help. Planning to ride a fire pole from the Moon back to Earth? The hardest part is sticking the landing. Hoping to cool the atmosphere by opening everyone’s freezer door at the same time? Maybe it’s time for a brief introduction to thermodynamics. Want to know what would happen if you rode a helicopter blade, built a billion-story building, made a lava lamp out of lava, or jumped on a geyser as it erupted? Okay, if you insist. Before you go on a cosmic road trip, feed the residents of New York City to a T. rex, or fill every church with bananas, be sure to consult this practical guide for impractical ideas. Unfazed by absurdity, Munroe consults the latest research on everything from swing-set physics to airliner catapult–design to answer his readers’ questions, clearly and concisely, with illuminating and occasionally terrifying illustrations. As he consistently demonstrates, you can learn a lot from examining how the world might work in very specific extreme circumstances.

In the New York Times best-selling book from the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, Randall Munroe gives hilarious and informative answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask. Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions. What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? If there was a robot apocalypse, how long would humanity last? What if everyone only had one soulmate? What would happen if the moon went away? In pursuit of answers, Munroe ran computer simulations, pored over stacks of declassified military research memos, solved differential equations, and consulted 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.) Far more than a book for geeks, What If? explains the laws of science in operation in a way that every intelligent reader will enjoy and feel much smarter for having read.

PLEASE NOTE: This is a summary of the book and NOT the original book. What If? by Randall Munroe - A 30-minute Instaread Summary Inside this Instaread Summary: • Overview of the entire book • Introduction to the important people in the book • Summary and analysis of all the chapters in the book • Key Takeaways of the book • A Reader's Perspective Preview of this summary: Chapters 1-4 Global Windstorm. If the earth stopped spinning, but the air kept moving, supersonic winds would develop everywhere except near the poles. Half the earth would freeze while the other half would burn up. People would survive only in a few places, such as research stations at the South Pole. Cold water would churn up from the ocean depths, creating global cooling and tsunamis. Eventually, however, the moon, still rotating, would start moving toward Earth. The tidal energy of the moon would tug on Earth and start it spinning again. Relativistic Baseball. A baseball traveling at ninety percent of light speed would create a thermonuclear explosion as it came in contact with the air. Batter, catcher, ballpark and everything nearby would be destroyed. It would also happen so fast that everything would remain stationary. An MIT scientist who also simulated this, however, told Munroe that his result could not be duplicated. Spent Fuel Pool. Swimming in a pool of spent nuclear reactor fuel would not be fatal. A swimmer who does not dive down and touch a spent fuel rod would be exposed to less radiation than a person normally gets walking around. The water temperature would be slightly less than that of a hot tub. Workers actually swim in these pools to service them…

AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “How To will make you laugh as you learn…With How To, you can't help but appreciate the glorious complexity of our universe and the amazing breadth of humanity's effort to comprehend it. If you want some lightweight edification, you won't go wrong with How To.” —CNET “[How To] has science and jokes in it, so 10/10 can recommend.” —Simone Giertz The world's most entertaining and useless self-help guide from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd and the bestsellers What If? and Thing Explainer For any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally complex, excessive, and inadvisable that no one would ever try it. How To is a guide to the third kind of approach. It's full of highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole. Bestselling author and cartoonist Randall Munroe explains how to predict the weather by analyzing the pixels of your Facebook photos. He teaches you how to tell if you're a baby boomer or a 90's kid by measuring the radioactivity of your teeth. He offers tips for taking a selfie with a telescope, crossing a river by boiling it, and powering your house by destroying the fabric of space-time. And if you want to get rid of the book once you're done with it, he walks you through your options for proper disposal, including dissolving it in the ocean, converting it to a vapor, using tectonic plates to subduct it into the Earth's mantle, or launching it into the Sun. By exploring the most complicated ways to do simple tasks, Munroe doesn't just make things difficult for himself and his readers. As he did so brilliantly in What If?, Munroe invites us to explore the most absurd reaches of the possible. Full of clever infographics and fun illustrations, How To is a delightfully mind-bending way to better understand the science and technology underlying the things we do every day.