Fantastic Answers to Life's Least Burning Questions

If you're a fan of xkcd, you're undoubtedly familiar with the comic's "What If?" feature. (If you've heard of neither of those things, well, then those links are your first step into a larger world.) Hopefully, you're also aware of the recently published book, What If?, a compilation of some of the best articles from the web site -- along with some new material.

What former NASA engineer turned webcomic artist Randall Munroe does is summed up in the subtitle of the book: he gives "Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions." The result is some great reading, broken up into easily digestible portions. Don't have time for a chapter of that doorstop fantasy series you've been chipping away at? Well, surely you've got a couple of minutes to learn what would happen if you took a swim in a spent nuclear fuel pool.

There are two keys to the book's effectiveness. First is the wide array of insane queries sent to him by his ever expanding pool of readers. Topics range from philosophy-meets-probability ("What if everyone actually had only one soul mate, a random person somewhere in the world?") to nerdy word play ("What would happen if you were to gather a mole -- unit of measurement -- of moles --the small furry critter-- in one place?") to culinary ("From what height would you need to drop a steak for it to be cooked when it hit the ground?"). There are things the Mythbusters would surely tackle, if only they could be done in reality. ("How hard would a puck have to be shot to be able to knock the goalie himself back into the net?") There are "who comes up with this?" questions. ("If someone's DNA suddenly vanished, how long would that person last?") There are people trying to measure fiction in real-world terms. ("How much Force power can Yoda output?") The questions come from every sphere imaginable, and they're all fun.

Even more key to the fun of the book is Randall Munroe's writing style. It's never enough for him to just to answer the question; he explores even more ridiculous layers to each scenario. And he describes the outcomes in hilarious prose, sprinkled with hilarious drawings, annotated with hilarious footnotes. Particular comedic triumphs in the book include:

• "What would happen if you made a periodic table out of cube-shaped bricks, where each brick was made of the corresponding element?" (The answer grows more hilarious with each descending row.)
• "What would happen if everyone on Earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same instant?" (Nothing the questioner was envisioning, but a global apocalypse as 7 billion people try to make their way out of one area on Earth.)
• "How many Lego bricks would it take to build a bridge capable of carrying traffic from London to New York?" (A great answer for all the ways it taunts LEGO enthusiasts with all the possible ways to say Legos -- properly and improperly.)
• A periodic feature of questions he doesn't answer, in part because they suggest unsettling things about the questioner. (For example: "How many houses are burned down in the U.S. each year? What would be the easiest way to increase that number by a significant amount?")

Whether you devour the book in large sections or make it your bathroom reader, What If? serves up lots of laughs. It's a definite grade A. The only down side is that eventually, it ends... and even that can be addressed by checking in regularly at Munroe's web site.