What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall MunroeMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Like the first one, this book is awesome. Funny, informative, scientific--what else you want in a book?
A former NASA employee who knows a lot of sciency stuff, the author responds to ridiculous questions with serious (hilarious, but still serious) answers based on math and physics. For example, "What if all the raindrops were lemon drops and gumdrops?" That idea, like a lot of them in this book, sounds pretty awesome, but the final result (spoiler, kinda) is a runaway greenhouse effect, boiling oceans, and the end of all life. Check it out--it'd be super bad. He has receipts. The whole book is kinda like that.
He's good at science, but he's also a good writer, and his tone cracks me up. The book is full of stuff like this: "The Earth is big, [citation needed]..." or a reference to the "swinging blade of death" equation, or his reply to a strange question with "Why if? Deeply ungrammatical answers to unanswerable philosophical questions." But it's all in the service of intriguing science, like how tall a swing can be that a person can still power by pumping their legs, or what would happen if you constructed a laser that vaporized incoming droplets, or whether you could make a lava lamp out of real lava. Taking goofy ideas seriously turns out to be pretty fun.
So this is a science book, and you could read it for the learning, but I enjoyed it most because it's also laugh out loud funny, which is super rare [citation needed].
Recommended.
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