What If? 2

Book Reviews

May 16

What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
By: Randall Munroe

[Nominee for ‘Best Nonfiction’ category of the 2022 Goodreads Choice Awards Reading Challenge]

“Space is the hottest place you can freeze to death.”

Randall Munroe creates delightful books. He must just have the best time combing through questions, figuring them out, and illustrating them. What a fun career!

I’ve already read What If? (volume 1) and How To? which were both informative yet useless in the best way.

What If? 2 takes on more questions from fans of Munroe’s work.

Questions like:

How many pigeons would it take to raise a person in a chair to the height of Australia’s Q1 skyscraper?
How many calories does Mario burn a day?
At what point in human history were there too many (English) books to be able to read them all in one lifetime?
What if Mercury (the planet) were entirely made up of Mercury?
How many people would it take to build Rome in a day?
Which has a greater gravitational pull on me: the Sun or spiders?
How many toasters do I need to heat my house?

A bonus feature of this book that I liked were the sections: Weird and Worrying (where he just listed questions people asked that were too weird or worrying to answer) and the Short Answers (where he was able to answer the questions in a few sentences or small pictures.)

These were interspersed throughout the book and helped break up the longer, more ‘scientific’ chapters.

As usual, the best part of the book is Munroe’s comic illustrations to help visualize the questions/answers. They are hilarious. Munroe’s sense of humor is on point. Which seems surprising since he’s a ‘retired' roboticist. Right?

Here are a few snapshots:

Of course, there are a lot of science-y words, equations, and entire sentences in this book that I shall never hope to understand, but since I’m not trying to replicate his words (which would mostly just be highly dangerous or impossible) we can just breeze past those without losing too much.

You don’t have to be a scientist to enjoy this book. You just have to be curious.

As I’ve said in reviews for his other books, I think every science teacher should own his books because I can see talking through some of these in a physics class would be really interesting and engaging for kids. I think the way Munroe talks about science and what we can learn from studying these things could inspire a lot of kids to pursue that kind of higher education.

What things can we learn? Well I’m glad you asked.

Here are just a few things I learned while reading this book:

The book itself weighs the same amount as the electrons from two bottle-nose dolphins.
There is a 50 square mile area of Yellowstone where, because of a mistake in drawing district lines, prosecuting a crime in this area requires that the jury come from an area with a population of 0.
The most expensive way to fill a shoe box would be LSD, plutonium, or Micro SD cards…. or a check written out for a buttload of money.
A cloud the size of a house contains about a liter of liquid water and would be the largest thing you could eat in one sitting.
The sun sets later for taller people. By a full second. And if you’re near the equator at sea level, every extra inch of height corresponds to nearly a minute of extra daylight per year. Which would be great for my 6’7” tall husband if he didn’t avoid the sun so much.
House dust is actually not mostly made up of dead cells. In other news… “You can’t inhale a person, but you can inhale a larger fraction of a person than I think anyone is really comfortable with.”
If you crush sugar in the dark it emits flashes of light. Apparently Wint-O-Green Life Savers are the best way to try it and my mind was blown a bit by this.
Plate tectonics regulates the earth’s temperature.
You can turn Niagara Falls off. Also they have less water flowing at night and in the off-season.
I learned about this terrifying story about spiders that I can’t unsee.

I was also inspired to investigate how taste buds work and how sunscreen works. Fun fact about sunscreen- if you put a layer of 50 SPF on and then a second layer, you go from letting in 1/50th of UV rays to 1/100th.