What If? Book Review

By Trevor Shum

What if? By Randall Munroe: Book Report

● Combines science, entertainment, and cartoons

● Answers questions that people send him

● Adds his own cartoons

● Is humorous

● The author is a cartoonist

● List a few of my favorites

● Inbox section

What if? By Randall Munroe is a book that combines science, entertainment, and cartoons. Randall Munroe is a cartoonist who has made several books during his career. Most of them, including What if?, have some scientific facts or explanations in them, but Munroe takes it further and adds his own humorous cartoons.

What if? Was published in 2014, and in this book, Munroe answers questions that he received as a suggestion to his new book. The book is split into dozens of chapters that each explain a one question that he decides to answer in the book. There are also several “inbox” pages, where he adds in every few questions. They have questions that were presumably “honorable mentions”, or questions that Munroe thinks are kind of silly. He doesn’t exactly answer the question, but rather responds with a simple cartoon with his opinion.

I wanted to talk about my favorite question, but I have too many favorites, so I chose three: One that involves a time machine, the second involving the earth stopping its spin, and the third involving a superfast baseball.

The first question was asked because the person wanted to inquire into what New York City looked like at different points of time (which the person if you were to time-travel you would end up in the same spot, just in a different time like in the Back to the Future movies (they stated this)). Randall Munroe used different cartoons for different time periods, and to some extant predict the future. I think that Munroe had to do some research, or ask someone who knows about the distant past (archeologists, paleontologists, etc), and made a bit of fun when talking about the future.

The second one was asked because the person wanted to know what would happen if the earth stopped spinning, but the atmosphere maintained its movement and speed. This, according to Munroe, would result in thousand-mile-per-hour winds, which would require a very strong bunker. Not only that, but you would have neighbors, so if their bunker was in front of yours and it uprooted, then your bunker would have to withstand a thousand-mile-per-hour blast from your neighbor’s bunker. There was also a joke, which was a reference to the 3 little pigs, which was:

“And the 92nd little pig built a house out of depleted uranium. And the wolf was like “Dude.” The answer is agreeable, as if the air kept its speed, it would be moving at how fast the earth was moving, 1,000 miles per hour which was different at different points on Earth, but it would still be supersonic for 80% percent of the world’s population. That’s very extreme! I wonder how it was calculated...

The third was “What would happen if you were to try to hit a baseball that was pitched at 90 percent the speed of light (604,000,000 miles per hour)?” According to Randall Munroe, if it was then the pitcher would first disintegrate, and because the air is not moving on the scale of the baseball, it would become a raging fireball, and it would then, on contact with the bat, produce a giant mushroom cloud. A joke added at the end was that according to baseball rules, the batter would be allowed to advance to first base in this scenario, provided they’re still alive. There is an explanation, which is that the baseball would be moving so fast that air speed didn’t matter, so it would pretty much combine with the air, so it would become a high-speed fireball. An interesting topic, and a funny ending.

There are so many more of these questions in the book and I really hope that you can go out there and get a copy of What if?. It’s great, and you can still read it before you understand the science behind, just for the laughs, cartoons and humor. Highly recommended!