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.

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. Early in 1955, the Federal Civil Defense Administration bought beer, soda, and carbonated water from local stores, then tested nuclear weapons on them.*

You also might want to double-check the authenticity of your pirate treasure map, because pirates didn’t actually bury treasure. That’s not quite true. There was one time that a pirate buried treasure somewhere. One time. And the entire idea of buried pirate treasure comes from that one incident.

Each key has a frequency roughly 1.059 times higher than the one to its left—that’s 21/12, which means that every 12 keys, the frequency doubles.

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.)

When you’re coming in to land at Edwards, you have to do the deorbit burn all the way back over Australia.

Everything in the baggage compartment is something that someone paid to transport, so it’s probably worth something.

As a rule of thumb, anything that puts out as much energy as a lake of lava becomes a lake of lava.

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

The jellyfish may point to a deeper problem with lava moats. Installing a lava moat provides additional protection, but the moat requires additional infrastructure, which creates its own vulnerabilities.

Forecasting based on averages works better in the tropics because there’s less variation in the weather.

Physics calculations suggest that the fundamental limit to our simulation-based forecasts is probably in the range of a couple of weeks.

Bolt’s agent told The New Yorker that Bolt has never run a mile.

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

Carrying computers can be difficult—especially the earlier ones that were the size of a whole room—so rather than carry the whole computer, you can try detaching a piece of the computer containing the file.

A rainbow covers 83° of the sky, making it slightly too wide to fit in an iPhone frame.)

96% have a positive impression of small business. (Gallup Poll, 2016)