"What If?" by Randall Munroe

This book is a little like the Imponderables series, except Imponderables asks "why does this happen?" and this asks "what if this happened?"

It's also the most hilarious thing I've read since Discworld. My favorite of the approximately 60 hypothetical situations in here are:

"What would happen if you made a periodic table out of cube-shaped bricks, where each brick was made of the corresponding element?" (|Toxic gas, fire, explosions, and radiation poisoning would happen.|)

"Is it possible to build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns?" (|Theoretically yes|)

"What would happen if you strapped C4 to a boomerang? Could this be an effective weapon, or would it be as stupid as it sounds?" (|The author didn't give an actual answer to this one, instead briefly wondering why you would want the high explosive to come back to you if you missed.|)

"What if a glass of water was, all of a sudden, literally half empty?" (|It would either make a loud bang or explode violently, depending on whether it was the top half or the bottom half that suddenly became a vacuum.|)

"Is it possible to boil a cup of water by stirring?" (|No, it isn't|)

And my personal favorite, "If a bullet with the density of a neutron star were fired from a handgun (ignoring the how) at the Earth's surface, would the Earth be destroyed?" (|No, though it would do weird things while burrowing into the core, and if you put it on a sufficiently sturdy pedestal it would do even weirder things to anyone who tried to touch it|)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A stern T for some bad language, for all the explanations except {T15+ish "If a woman were to have sperm cells made from her own stem cells and impregnate herself, what would be her relationship with her daughter?"}, which is T15+ for sexual references. This could be an awesome videogame.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "Well, you know what they say -- 'Lightning always strikes in the same place. That place is in Venezuela. You shouldn't stand there.'"

    Page 269, from "If all the lightning strikes happening in the world on any given day all happened in the same place at once, what would happen to that place?"

 

    "I'm ruined! Where did it all go wrong?"

    "Uh. I'm guessing the part at the beginning where you decided to print out Wikipedia."

    Page 254, from "If you had a printed version of the whole of (say, the English) Wikipedia, how many printers would you need to keep up with the changes made to the live version?" (|Only about 6, but the ink would ruin you.|)

    "Then the 92nd little pig built a house out of depleted uranium. And the wolf was like, 'Dude.'"

    Page 3, from "What would happen if the Earth and all terrestrial objects suddenly stopped spinning, but the atmosphere retained its velocity?"

 

    Remember: I am a cartoonist. If you follow my advice on safety around nuclear materials, you probably deserve whatever happens to you.

    Page 12, from "What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? How long could I stay safely at the surface?"

 

    "Oh, that's easy. There are tons of parachutes lying around on a submarine."

    Page 81, from "How long could a nuclear submarine last in orbit?"

 

(Endnote: As befits a book by the author of xkcd, there are little comics interspersed with the normal words. These are the source of most of my favorite lines.)