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

by Randall Munroe

This is a book of bad ideas. At least, most of them are bad ideas. It’s possible some good ones slipped through the cracks. If so, I apologize.

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

Could you open bottles using nuclear bombs? 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.

The lagoon created by the flood remains to this day, and can be seen on maps at 4.40°N, 100.59°E. The cataclysm was recorded by a bystander with a camcorder, and the footage has since been uploaded to the internet. Despite its low quality, it’s one of the most jaw-dropping pieces of video ever recorded.

The reason “buried treasure” is such a well-known trope is that Captain Kidd’s story helped inspire Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island, which almost single-handedly* created the modern image of the pirate.

High-frequency sounds are absorbed by air as they travel through it, so they fade out quickly. That’s why nearby thunder makes a higher-pitched “cracking” sound, while faraway thunder makes a low rumble. They both sound the same at the source, but over a long distance, the high-frequency components of the thunder are muffled and only the low-frequency ones reach your ear.

(In retrospect, my plan to fluster an astronaut by throwing extreme situations at him might have been flawed.)

At some point in the move, many people take a look at all their possessions, realize how much work will be involved in moving, and realize that it would be easier to push everything into a hole and walk away, leaving it all behind.

The good news is that, in a frictionless vacuum, pushing stuff sideways doesn’t take any work at all. And if you’re moving downhill, the move will actually require negative work—you’ll get energy back! The bad news is that you probably don’t live in a frictionless vacuum. Most people don’t, despite the clear advantages one would offer when moving.

I really love that we can ask physics ridiculous questions like, “What kind of gas mileage would my house get on the highway?” and physics has to answer us.

This idea sounds ridiculous, so, unsurprisingly, the US military studied it during the Cold War. In a 178-page report, they analyzed the idea of producing a super heavy-lift helicopter by the sophisticated engineering technique of taking two helicopters and gluing them together.

This mount fits into a socket in the belly of the Shuttle orbiter. Next to the mount is an instructional plaque, which features the single best joke in the history of the aerospace industry: ATTACH ORBITER HERE NOTE: BLACK SIDE DOWN

He’s the fastest person in the world . . . unless you need to run farther than a few hundred meters. His time in the 400-meter sprint is good, but more than two seconds behind the world record.* At distances beyond that, he doesn’t even match a good high school sprinter. Bolt’s agent told The New Yorker that Bolt has never run a mile.

In a sense, skiers are really just mountain climbers who are unusually bad at climbing but make up for it with very good balance.

The actual explanation for why ice is slippery is, surprisingly, still the subject of ongoing physics research. The general explanation seems to be that there’s a layer of liquid water on the surface of ice because the water molecules aren’t firmly locked into the ice crystal lattice.

In addition to ice skates, physicists don’t really understand what causes electric charges to build up in thunderstorms, why sand in an hourglass flows at the speed it does, or why your hair gets a static charge when you rub it with a balloon.

The snowflakes formed in this way are more compact and misshapen than the delicate shape of natural snowflakes. Natural snowflakes have much more time to grow slowly in a cloud, one water molecule at a time, which allows intricate and symmetrical shapes to form.

As is so often the case, a “free” source of energy ultimately comes with a terrible long-term cost.

“Sin,” she said, “is when you treat people as things.”

Whether or not you buy into the philosophy of the categorical imperative, it’s good practical advice, because people can tell when they’re being treated as things.

We can be shortsighted and confused and make lots of mistakes, but we can smell disdain and condescension from a mile away.

Comedian Mitch Hedberg once commented that an escalator can never break; it can only become stairs.

And phones make it easy to crop our images after the fact, so it makes sense to err on the side of “too wide” and let users do the zooming and cropping. But the wide field of view comes with a cost: when you use a wide-angle lens to take a picture of a small or faraway subject, it may not show you what you expect.

The biblical name Sarah was one of the most popular names in the United States in the 1980s, but by the mid-2010s there were more babies in the United States being named “Brooklyn” than “Sarah.”

In the same way that nuclear testing filled the atmosphere with radioactive fallout, the burning of leaded gasoline contaminated the air with lead. This led to a mid-20th-century lead poisoning epidemic, which peaked around 1972.

Children in many areas had lead levels above 20 µg/dL, levels that we now know to cause significant harm to developing brains.

In 2016, a Canadian man from Thornhill, Ontario, spent $137 to legally change his name to “Above Znoneofthe,” and filed to run in a provincial election. He intended to be listed on the ballot as “ZNONEOFTHE ABOVE,” with the Z included to put him at the end of the alphabetical list of names, hoping that people would mistake his name for a “None of the above” option.

The second Ron Estes was listed on the ballot as Ron M. Estes. The incumbent Ron changed his campaign signs to list him as “Rep. Ron Estes” and ran ads informing voters that the M stood for “Misleading.” The other Ron retaliated by telling voters it stood for “’Merica.”

Currey located a tree that seemed especially old (unbeknownst to him, local naturalists had dubbed it “Prometheus”) and obtained permission from the Forest Service to cut it down to determine its precise age. After counting the rings from the trunk sections, Currey determined that the bristlecone pine was at least 4,844 years old, making it the world’s oldest known tree.

When Einstein was studying the movement of electromagnetic waves through space, he was puzzled by how Maxwell’s equations seemed to imply that an electromagnetic wave can never appear stationary relative to any observer.

The equations suggested that you could never catch up to a light wave and see it frozen in place—no matter how fast you went, you’d measure the light moving past you at the same number of miles per hour. This led Einstein to realize that something must be wrong with our idea of “miles” and “hours,” and his theories explained how time flows differently for different observers depending on how fast they’re going.

If the government of a country wakes up one morning and decides to move all their clocks back five hours, no one can stop them.

When wood, oil, or paper burns, the heat of the fire is the heat from that sunlight.

There’s no nondestructive test for indestructibility.