How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

by Randall Munroe

Physics doesn’t care if your question is weird. It just gives you the answer, without judging.

This is a completely ridiculous suggestion, so it should come as no surprise that it was studied by the US government during the Cold War. Early in 1955, the Federal Civil Defense Administration bought beer, soda, and carbonated water from local stores, then tested nuclear weapons on them.*

The saga of the government’s nuclear war on beer is cataloged in a 17-page report titled The Effect of Nuclear Explosions on Commercially Packaged Beverages, a copy of which was helpfully unearthed by nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein.

A pure tone, on the other hand, is just a simple sine wave; the sound is made up of air moving smoothly forward and backward.

Much of North America is moving west, relative to the rest of the Earth, at about an inch per year. It seems obvious that property lines must move with the crust, since the alternative would be ridiculous—an inch of plate movement per year is enough that within just a decade or two, you could lose your garden on one side of your house while taking ownership of your neighbor’s on the other.

Thanks to these different grids, no latitude/longitude coordinates are ever really precise and unambiguous without lots of information about the datum they’re in. If you think that sounds like a huge headache for anyone who has to deal with precise coordinates, you’re right.

In reality, a baseball pitcher can’t deliver all their power to the ball—they need to accelerate parts of their hand and arm to high speeds along with it.

And, confirming this, many people have successfully recreated the throw. In 1936, retired pitcher Walter Johnson successfully threw a silver dollar 386 feet over the Rappahannock. A day earlier, first baseman Lou Gehrig threw a silver dollar over a 400-foot-wide stretch of the Hudson.

Why?

predicting the weather is a matter of getting enough data and then doing lots of math on it. The atmosphere operates according to relatively well-understood laws of fluid dynamics.

Physics calculations suggest that the fundamental limit to our simulation-based forecasts is probably in the range of a couple of weeks. After two or three weeks, the inherent chaotic nature of the system renders prediction

impossible.

Smallpox, a disease caused by another virus, may well be responsible for the largest death toll of any human infectious disease.