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.

if you’re ever faced with some kind of frightening illusory phantom, just remember this handy optics rule: If you can see it, you can shoot it with a laser.

A shoebox full of pure LSD would be worth about $2.5 billion.

You’re not descended from most humans who have ever lived. You’re probably descended from about 10 percent of them,

If you built an iPhone with vacuum tubes instead of transistors, packed together with the same density as they were in UNIVAC, the phone would be about the size of five city blocks when resting on one edge.

Conversely, if you built the original UNIVAC out of iPhone-size components, the entire machine would be less than 300 microns tall, small enough to embed inside a single grain of salt.

But one neat thing about space heaters is that they’re all equally efficient: All space heaters produce one watt of heat for each watt of electricity they draw.