What If? 10th Anniversary Edition: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

by Randall Munroe

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.

There’s no material safety data sheet for astatine. If there were, it would just be the word “NO” scrawled over and over in charred blood.

The explosion would be just the right size to maximize the amount of paperwork your lab would face. If the explosion were smaller, you could potentially cover it up. If it were larger, there would be no one left in the city to submit paperwork to.

Think of the elements as dangerous, radioactive, short-lived Pokémon.

A new milestone: The hair dryer is now, impossibly, consuming more power than every other electrical device on the planet combined.

I love this book.

In the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University sits a battery-powered bell that has been ringing since the year 1840. The bell “rings” so quietly it’s almost inaudible, using only a tiny amount of charge with every motion of the clapper. Nobody knows exactly what kind of batteries it uses because nobody wants to take it apart to figure it out.

Neutrinos are ghostly particles that barely interact with the world at all. Look at your hand—there are about a trillion neutrinos from the Sun passing through it every second. Okay, you can stop looking at your hand now. The reason you don’t notice the neutrino flood is that neutrinos mostly ignore ordinary matter. On average, out of that massive flood, only one neutrino will “hit” an atom in your body every few years.

Here’s a question to give you a sense of scale. Which of the following would be brighter, in terms of the amount of energy delivered to your retina: A supernova, seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth, or the detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball? Can you hurry up and set it off? This is heavy. Applying Dr. Spector’s rule of thumb suggests that the supernova is brighter. And indeed, it is . . . by nine orders of magnitude.

There have certainly been enough Lego1 bricks to connect New York and London. In LEGO2 units, New York and London are 700 million studs apart. That means that if you arranged bricks like this . . . . . . it would take 350 million of them to connect the two cities.

There have been over 400 billion Lego4 pieces produced over the years.

Also, you don’t usually shoot astronauts with a bow and arrow—at least not for an undergraduate degree.