What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

by Randall Munroe

“Stand on the other side from where the physics is happening” is actually a good general rule for scientific equipment.

In 1988, oceanographer John Martin famously claimed—in his best supervillain voice—“Give me half a tanker of iron, and I will give you an ice age.”

These shimmering clumps of land and buildings floating above the horizon are called a Fata Morgana, so named because people thought they looked like the floating castles of the sorceress Morgan le Fay.

High-quality diamonds are expensive, but it’s hard to get a handle on their exact price because the entire industry is a scam the gemstone market is complicated.

It might seem confusing that someone navigating toward Earth’s north pole would be attracted to the MRI’s south pole, but that’s because the Earth’s pole names are backward. The “north” end of a magnet is the one that points toward the Earth’s north pole, which means the Earth’s north magnetic pole is technically a south magnetic pole, and vice versa. This is deeply annoying to me, but there’s nothing we can do about it, so we might as well move on.

There are lots of ways you could build your vehicle—an electric car with wheels designed to dig into the pavement on turns, a rocket-powered hovercraft, or a pod that runs along a rail on the track—but in each case, it’s pretty easy to develop the design to the point where the human is the weakest part.

In effect, you’re creating a cloud of steam around yourself, into which you’re pumping more and more laser energy. In other words, you’d be building a human-size version of an autoclave, which is a piece of equipment used to sterilize objects through the incineration of organic matter within it. “Incineration of organic matter within it” is a bad feature for an umbrella.

What if the Earth were made entirely of protons, and the Moon were made entirely of electrons? —Noah Williams This might be the most destructive What If scenario I’ve written about.

Once you have a naked singularity, physics starts breaking down in very big ways. Quantum mechanics and general relativity give absurd answers, and they’re not even the same absurd answers. Some people have argued that the laws of physics simply don’t allow for that kind of situation to arise. As Dr. Keeler put it, “Nobody likes a naked singularity.”

If you get up to escape velocity, then at the last minute remember that you need to slow down, you’ll be in for an unpleasant surprise as you try to grab on to the pole. At best, you’ll be flung away and plummet to your death. At worst, your hands and the surface of the pole will both be converted into exciting new forms of matter, and then you’ll be flung away and plummet to your death.

There’s some good news: Deep in the Sun, the photons carrying energy around have very short wavelengths—they’re mostly a mix of what we’d consider hard and soft X-rays. This means they penetrate your body to various depths, heating your internal organs and also ionizing your DNA, causing irreversible damage before they even start burning you. Looking back, I notice that I started this paragraph with “there’s some good news.” I don’t know why I did that.

What if all the raindrops were lemon drops and gumdrops? —Shuo Peskoe-Yang If all the raindrops were lemon drops and gumdrops Oh, what a rain that would be! I’d stand outside with my mouth open wide . . . —Children’s song This scenario is a catastrophe even by What If standards.