NO QUESTION TOO STRANGE OR STUPID
The world according to Newton and Einstein is so confusing, so complex. You might remember the basics at best. F = ma. e = mc2. But weightier questions remain. To wit:
— How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live?
— What would happen if the earth’s rotation were sped up until a day lasted only one second?
And of course. . .
— If every person on Earth aimed a laser pointer at the Moon at the same time, would it change color?
Aristotle called those who study the physical world phusikoi (from which we get “physics.”) Today, we call such people “nerds.” But Randall Munroe calls them “fans.”
Starting from an Internet cartoon that quickly went viral, Munroe has become America’s most celebrated “thing explainer.” On both his website and in four best-selling books, he has patiently researched and answered some of the strangest questions ever posed.
— What would happen if the moon went away?
— At what speed would you have to drive for rain to shatter your windshield?
—What if you funneled Niagara Falls through a straw? Watch.
Munroe came by his curiosity at an early age. Growing up in Pennsylvania, he was just five when he asked his mother, “Are there more soft things or hard things in the world?” He soon began roaming his house counting hard and soft, then estimated that the world contained “about 3 billion soft things and five billion hard things.” He would later call this obsession with answers “nerd sniping.”
After studying physics in college and landing a job in robotics at NASA, Munroe seemed set for the buttoned-down life. But in 2006, back when there was still hope of making sense of this world, he quit his job to pursue his lifelong love of cartooning.
Munroe’s xkcd was “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” Though the clever comic had nothing but stick-figures, fellow nerd snipers made it an Internet sensation, with 70 million hits a month.
Still freelancing in physics, Munroe developed an Internet Relay Chat, whatever that is, and tinkered with RGB colors, whatever those might be. Then one afternoon, during a weekend workshop at MIT, he was explaining physics to teens when. . .
His equations calculating potential energy were drawing blank faces. Suddenly Munroe remembered “Star Wars,” the one where Yoda uses The Force to lift a Starfighter out of a swamp on the planet Dagobah. Doing the math “on the fly,” Munroe estimated the starship’s weight, the planet’s gravity, and how much potential energy Yoda held in his crabby green hand.
The answer? 19.2 Kwh, about as much as the engine in a Smart Car.
When his students “suddenly perked up,” Monroe had a brilliant idea. What if he opened his cartoon website to wild hypothetical questions from readers? DONE! And when most of their hypotheticals hinted at apocalypse, Munroe discovered a talent for describing the grim consequences.
First question: What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light?
“I sat down with some physics books, a Nolan Ryan action figure, and a bunch of videotapes of nuclear tests and tried to sort it all out.” Crunching numbers, he calculated that a light-speed fastball would fuse all molecules in its path, turning the air into “into an expanding bubble of incandescent plasma” and causing a nuclear explosion. The stadium, the city, would be gone. And the batter? “Hit by pitch.”
The questions just kept coming.
— What if everyone who took the SAT guessed on every multiple-choice question? How many perfect scores would there be? (None.)
— What would happen if everyone on earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped? (Not much until everyone started to go back home.)
In 2014, Munroe gathered his favorites into What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. Physics books usually sell in the mid-three figures but What If? tapped the morbid curiosity of a baffling world. Suddenly you could know precisely “What would happen to the Earth if the Sun suddenly switched off?” (It’s not pretty.)
Monroe’s serious answers to absurd questions brought him instant acclaim. He spoke to Google engineers at the Googleplex. He won a Hugo Award for Best Science-Fiction Graphic story. What If? was translated into 35 languages. And he had an asteroid named after him.
Unphased by success, Munroe took more questions on his website, then began explaining complex ideas using only the most common 1,000 words in English. The essays became his next book — Thing Explainer. How do those “food heating radio boxes,” aka microwaves work? How do “planes with turning wings” (helicopters) fly?
While delighting readers, Munroe still takes physics seriously. He spends a day or more researching each question. Along with those stick cartoons that the Boston Globe called “charmingly amateurish,” What If? and its sequel, What If?2, include minutely detailed references for each question. These range from computer simulations to scientific papers to personal calls to fellow physicists.
The world remains complex and confusing. Nonetheless, F still equals ma and, last time we checked, e still adds up to mc with a little 2 after it. And if these certainties are not enough, you can ask Randall Munroe. Ask him anything.
“They say there are no stupid questions. That’s obviously wrong; I think my question about hard and soft things, for example, is pretty stupid. But it turns out that trying to thoroughly answer a stupid question can take you to some pretty interesting places.”
