How To Quotes

“Physics doesn’t care if your question is weird. It just gives you the answer, without judging.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“There’s no nondestructive test for indestructibility.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“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.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“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.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“However, the tests still suggest that nuclear weapons probably don’t make great bottle openers.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“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.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“if you mention how many nuclear weapons you have, you can convince them to give you a discount.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“Hello! This is a book of bad ideas.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“From 1960 into the 21st century, Pennsylvania has voted for five different people named Bob Casey”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“It turns out that if you accelerate at 1 G for several years, you can reach almost any destination in the universe. After a few years have passed [traveling at that rate], the effects of relativity really start to add up. When 3 years have passed for you ... you'll have traveled nearly 10 light-years - far enough to reach many nearby stars. If you continue accelerating, it would take you less than 20 years of your time to reach a neighboring galaxy. If you keep pressing the accelerator for a little over two decades, you'll find your vehicle traveling billions of light-years per subjective "year", carrying you across a substantial fraction of the observable universe.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“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.*”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“If the bottom of your pool is above sea level, connecting it to the ocean won’t work; water would just flow downhill to the sea. But what if you could bring the sea up to you? Well, you’re in luck; it’s happening whether you want it to or not. Thanks to the trapped heat caused by greenhouse gases, the seas have been rising for many decades now. Sea-level-rise is caused by a combination of melting ice and thermal expansion of the water. If you want to fill your pool, you could try accelerating sea-level rise. Sure, it would worsen the immeasurable ecological and human toll of climate change, but on the other hand, you could have a sweet pool party.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“This sounded like a ridiculous idea, but every other idea they could come up with was worse.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“skiers are really just mountain climbers who are unusually bad at climbing but make up for it with very good balance.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“This idea sounds ridiculous, so, unsurprisingly, the US military studied it during the Cold War.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“We can use geometry to work out how far away your camera needs to be in order to take a photo of yourself in front of the Moon. This tells us that the camera needs to be about 600 feet away to take a Moon selfie.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“Comedian Mitch Hedberg once commented that an escalator can never break; it can only become stairs. Well, an escalator waterwheel generator can never break . . . . . . it can only become an extremely impractical bicycle.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“The Department of Energy suggests the total available United States hydropower—which would include building dams on wildlife reserves and scenic rivers—is 85 gigawatts, 1/20th of that total. That’s just 700 watts per household.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“The first US spy satellites used film cameras. After they had taken their photos, the capsules containing the film were dropped back to Earth.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“The first vaccine for smallpox was developed at the end of the 18th century, and by the end of the 19th century, the disease had become comparatively rare in most industrialized countries. In the 20th century, medical advances made the vaccine easier to produce and transport around the world, leading to a global campaign to eradicate smallpox completely. It succeeded: the last smallpox infection “in the wild” occurred in Somalia in 1977, and the last outbreak in history—and the final smallpox death—happened after a lab accident in 1978.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“The photo-color forecast may not be as reliable as a supercomputer-simulation of the atmosphere, but it’s pretty impressive for an ancient method contained in a catchy rhyme.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“Post good pics in the evening, then the bad weather's leaving. Morning selfies go viral, there's a low-pressure spiral.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“Whatever our faults, humans have countless millennia of experience in judging the intentions of others—a skill much older and deeper than our ability to put our feelings into words. We can be shortsighted and confused and make lots of mistakes, but we can smell disdain and condescension from a mile away.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“Whatever our faults, humans have countless millenia of experience in judging the intentions of others—a skill much older and deeper than our ability to put our feelings into words. We can be shortsighted and confused and make lots of mistakes, but we can smell disdain and condescension from a mile away.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“A person on a very large horse has a combined weight roughly equal to that of an American football team, and the horse’s high speed would give a momentum advantage, making it easier to shove through the opposing team.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“The chart above tells us that a 900°C lava pool will radiate roughly 100 kilowatts of heat per square meter. If electricity costs around $0.10 per kilowatt–hour, then each square meter of a 900°C lava moat will cost at least $10 per hour if heated electrically. If your moat is a meter wide and encloses an area of one acre, it will cost roughly $60,000 per day to keep it molten.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“The Syracuse University Lava Project, which produces artificial lava for both geologic research and art projects, uses billion-year-old basalt from Wisconsin. The basalt formed when the core of the North American continent developed a crack down the middle and large amounts of magma bubbled through. The crack eventually healed up, but it left a crescent-shaped scar of dense basalt buried beneath the soil of the Midwest.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“Tectonic plates are in constant motion. Much of North America is moving west, relative to the rest of the Earth, at about an inch per year.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“Carrying your stuff by hand is also a bad idea. Let’s say you can walk while carrying about 40 pounds. As a general rule of thumb, all the furnishings and possessions in a typical 4-bedroom house will weigh around 10,000 pounds, which means you’ll need to take a total of 250 trips.* If you have 3 people helping you, and you can walk 10 miles a day,* it will take you 7 years to move.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

“Sometimes, when you find an outlet, there’s something already plugged in, such as someone else’s phone or an unattended piece of equipment. If you carry a little portable power strip around, you can sometimes unplug the cord for a moment and plug it into your power strip, then use one of the other outlets—although you may want to exercise caution while doing this.”
― Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems