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

by Randall Munroe

This book explores unusual approaches to common tasks, and looks at what would happen to you if you tried them. Figuring out why they would or wouldn’t work can be fun and informative and sometimes lead you to surprising places. Maybe an idea is bad, but figuring out exactly why it’s a bad idea can teach you a lot—and might help you think of a better approach.

After all, for anything that “everyone knows” by the time they reach adulthood, every day over 10,000 people in the United States alone are learning it for the first time. That’s why I don’t like making fun of people for admitting they don’t know something or never learned how to do something. Because if you do that, all it does is teach them not to tell you when they’re learning something . . . and you miss out on the fun.

The great thing about physics is that you can run these numbers for any material you want, even if it’s something ridiculous. 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.*

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.*

If you spend 10 hours digging a hole in order to find treasure worth $50, you’re working for far below minimum wage. In principle, you’d be better off just getting a job digging up driveways somewhere, and in the end, you’d make more money than you would from the treasure.

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.

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.

One of the most common infrasound tones is produced by waves on the open ocean. As the sea rises and falls, it presses rhythmically against the air, behaving like the surface of a huge, slow music speaker—the loudest, deepest subwoofer on the planet.

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

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.

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

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

For a long time, people believed that the pressure from a skate blade melted the surface of the ice to create a thin, slippery layer of water. Scientists and engineers in the late 1800s demonstrated that the pressure of an ice skate blade could lower the melting point of ice from 0°C to −3.5°C. For decades, pressure melting was accepted as the standard explanation for how ice skates work. For some reason, no one pointed out that it was possible to skate at temperatures colder than −3.5°C. The pressure melting theory suggests it should be impossible, but ice skaters do it all the time.

Given how much time modern physics spends on deep and abstract mysteries like searching for gravitational waves or the Higgs boson, it can be surprising how many basic everyday phenomena aren’t well understood.

When a competitor’s score in a sport is strongly correlated with their odds of dying, it creates obvious problems for the sport.

When the Apollo astronauts climbed into the command module as they approached Earth, they left the suitcase behind in the lunar module; then they fired the lunar module’s engines to divert it to the area over the Tonga Trench, one of the deepest parts of the Pacific—so the cask would fall into the sea and sink to the bottom. In the decades since, no excess radioactivity was ever detected, which means the protective shell did its job. The cask of plutonium lies on the floor of the Pacific to this day. The plutonium is about half-decayed by now, but it’s still producing over 800 watts of heat as of 2019. Maybe some deep-sea critter looking for warmth is cuddled up to it right now.

Immanuel Kant developed a rule called the “categorical imperative,” which was at the center of his idea of ethics. He expressed the rule in several different formulations; the second formulation read, in part, “Act in such a way that you treat humanity . . . never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”

In Terry Pratchett’s novel Carpe Jugulum, the character Granny Weatherwax expressed the principle more succinctly. A young man tried to tell Granny that the nature of sin was a complicated thing. She said that, no, it was very simple. “Sin,” she said, “is when you treat people as things.”

If you accelerate at 1 G, your speed increases by 9.81 m/s every second. After 1 year, simple multiplication suggests you should be traveling at about 309 million m/s . . . which is 103 percent of the speed of light. Relativity tells us you can’t really travel faster than light, so we know that’s wrong—you can get closer and closer to the speed of light, but you can never quite reach it. Yet there aren’t any cosmic police who show up and force you to stop accelerating, so what actually happens to you? Strangely, from your point of view, nothing happens as your scooter approaches the speed of light. You just continue accelerating. But if you look out at the universe around you, you’ll notice things getting a little strange.

No matter how fast you go, you’ll never get to the edge of the universe. But you can reach the end.

Written words are a message to the future. The person reading it is always further ahead in time than the person writing it. I don’t know what date it is when you’re reading these words, where you are, or what you’re trying to do. But wherever you are and whatever problems you’re trying to solve, I hope this book has helped. There’s a giant, weird world out there. Ideas that sound good can have terrible consequences, and ideas that sound ridiculous can turn out to be revolutionary. Sometimes you can figure out which ones work ahead of time, and sometimes you just have to try them and see what happens.