What if randall munroe

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What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions comes out 9/13. Preorder here!

Hailstones

My 4 year old son and I were wondering about soccer ball sized hail today. How much damage would a hail storm with size 5 soccer ball sized hail do?

When you think about it, it’s honestly kind of weird that hailstones haven’t killed all of us already. I mean, they’re chunks of ice that plunge from the sky!

Hailstones fall from really high up. There’s a popular myth that a penny dropped from the Empire State Building can kill you. The myth isn’t true, [1] Mythbusters tried it in Season 1 Episode 7 and found that the penny would really sting and make you go «ow!!» but for anyone who believes it, hailstones should be terrifying—after all, they often fall from the height of ten Empire State Buildings.

Luckily, the same thing that saves us from falling pennies also generally protects us from hailstones: Air resistance. As they fall, both pennies and hailstones quickly reach terminal velocity, the speed at which drag balances out gravity and prevents them from speeding up any more. For a small hailstone the size of a pea or a marble, terminal velocity might be only 10 or 20 miles per hour, the speed of an object tossed across a room. Getting hit by them isn’t comfortable, but it’s not likely to cause serious injury. [2] While dropping a penny on someone from the height of the Empire State Building wouldn’t kill them, dropping the Empire State Building on a them from the height of a penny would, as demonstrated by the tragic demise of Jebediah Mythbuster in the pilot episode of the show eventually named in his memory.

Large hailstones travel much faster than small ones and can be a lot more dangerous. The terminal velocity of a golf-ball-sized hailstone is about 60 miles per hour, [3] A little slower than an actual golf ball, thanks to the golf ball’s greater weight and those weird drag-reducing dimples. which could easily cause serious injury. Large hailstorms often cause extreme damage to cars, and the largest hailstones can be deadly. A storm in China in 2002 dropped egg-sized and baseball-sized hailstones that killed several dozen people and hospitalized many others.

Luckily, deaths from hail aren’t very common, for two main reasons: First, because hailstones big enough to be deadly are rare, and second, because when there’s a thunderstorm severe enough to produce such large hail, people generally try to take shelter.

A hailstone the size and shape of a regulation soccer ball would be more than twice the weight of the heaviest hailstones on record. It would have a terminal velocity of roughly 140 miles per hour, which is really fast. If one of them hit your car, it wouldn’t just dent the body or crack the windshield, it could punch right through the roof. Sheltering indoors might not be enough to protect you, unless you had a particularly sturdy roof or possibly several floors above you.

When a hailstorm is nearby, it’s good to take shelter even if you’re not right below the storm. As a hailstone forms in a thunderstorm updraft, it bounces around like popcorn in a popcorn machine. Usually, it falls out of the bottom of the storm, but sometimes it’s ejected out of the top or sides, then carried by wind to fall some distance from the storm. Aircraft flying near thunderstorms have been hit by hail when they have nothing but blue sky above them.

Real hailstones, especially large ones, aren’t round like a soccer ball. As they tumble around in a thunderstorm, they grow via water freezing onto their sides. If they have a lump on one side, the protrusion can collect more water and grow faster than the areas around it, forming a blobby appendage. Liquid water can also run out to the edges of a rotating hailstone and freeze, forming icicle-like features.

The weird shapes of large hailstones are good news for us ground-dwellers with breakable bones, because these protrusions tend to increase their drag and lower their terminal velocity.

But the weird shapes of hailstones also raises an interesting possibility. If a hailstone had just the right combination of lobes, it’s possible—if unlikely—that it might happen to form a lifting body. This strange category of aircraft—which includes the Space Shuttle, the M2-F1, and the Dream Chaser—can be unexpectedly aerodynamic despite their compact shapes, capable of gliding or even swoops.

. there might even have been one able to score a goal.

«What If» Рэндалла Манро: самая увлекательная книга о науке

Борислав Козловский — о том, как художник комиксов для гиков XKCD стал автором главной нон-фикшн-книги месяца.

Сойдет ли Земля с орбиты, если все семь миллиардов людей соберутся на территории Род-Айленда, самого маленького штата США, и одновременно подпрыгнут? Планета перевешивает человечество в 10 триллионов раз, поэтому не сдвинется ни на йоту. Эти расчеты доступны каждому семикласснику, который не прогуливал физику. Но автор идет дальше и интересуется: скоро ли после прыжка семимиллиардная толпа сможет разъехаться по домам? Чтобы решить проблему за срок одной человеческой жизни, никакого транспорта не хватит. «В течение нескольких недель Род-Айленд станет могилой для миллиардов». По возможности избегайте этого.

Даже больше, чем написание научно-популярных книг, Рэндалла Манро увлекают научно-популярные комиксы для гиков.
Фотография: ted.com Под обложкой «Что если?» разбираются самые нелепые вопросы — в духе классического «Если кит на слона налезет, кто кого сборет?» — со всей серьезностью, на какую только способна наука. Что если атомная подводная лодка очутится в космосе? Из нее выйдет отличная орбитальная станция — герметичная, с хорошим запасом кислорода. Однако над отводом тепла придется поломать голову. И еще, что важно, субмарина развалится на куски при входе в плотные слои атмосферы из-за своей геометрической формы.

Дебютная книга 30-летнего Рэндалла Манро заняла первое место в списке бестселлеров The New York Times в категории нон-фикшн, едва ее напечатали. Откуда столько внимания? Последние девять лет Манро рисует комиксы для гиков: типичные герои его проекта «XKCD» — число пи, Дарт Вейдер, курсор зависшего макбука, аксиома выбора теории множеств и даже Дмитрий Менделеев («Я Аватар, владыка Четырех Элементов» — «А я Менделеев, владыка всех 118 с лишним», и дальше о том, чего стоит магия воды и огня против магии полония-210). Уже в октябре 2007 года сайт с комиксами собирал 70 миллионов кликов в месяц. Секрет успеха в том, что XKCD.com — это новый извод жанра «физики шутят»: теперь предмет иронии не столько сама наука, сколько разговоры в курилке на тему науки. Манро взялся шутить про культуру технарей, которые шутят над собой. При этом за вопросами в книге «Что если?» можно угадать очень даже почтенный научный метод мысленного эксперимента, который сделали популярным Эйнштейн со Шредингером, придумывая теорию относительности и квантовую механику.

Gedankenexperiment, мысленный эксперимент, — это, конечно, никакой не дешевый заменитель настоящего опыта с колбами и ядовитыми испарениями, на который у ученого не хватило сил или денег. Он принципиально имеет дело с такими материями, каким будет тесно в любой колбе. Раз законы природы работают везде и всегда — мы для проверки теории на прочность обязаны применить свои формулы к самому странному, что только можем вообразить. Так на сцену выходят кот Шредингера, демон Максвелла или мозг, который на доли секунды слепился случайным образом в космической пустоте из пыли и газа, выступил в роли Квантового Наблюдателя и немедленно рассосался (его называют больцмановским мозгом).

Рэндалл Манро. «What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions», 2014

Вот Манро и ставит Gedankenexperiment над вещами, которыми у большой науки нет времени озаботиться. Как скоро в фейсбуке мертвых пользователей станет больше, чем живых? В 2065-м или в 2130-м — в зависимости от сценария развития соцсети. Если она в течение 10 лет потеряет популярность, как ЖЖ, то новые пользователи перестанут появляться, а к 2060 году состарится и умрет большинство тех, кто завел аккаунт сейчас. В противном случае аудитория будет расти вместе с населением Земли, и живые сравняются числом с мертвыми только за 115 лет.

С таким тяжелым логическим вооружением соблазнительно зайти на территорию культуры, чтобы, например, уточнить разные торжественные истины. «Над Британской империей никогда не заходит солнце» — а что следует сделать, чтобы заходило? Отнять у британской короны острова Питкэрн в Тихом океане, где, по переписи 2014 года, живут всего 56 человек. Если их расселить, Великобритания останется на час без солнца — впервые за 200 с лишним лет.

Для науки вообще обычное дело незаметно менять контекст, в который культура погружена. До 1971 года, рассказывает Манро, «Маленький принц» воспринимался иначе, чем после. Тогда космический зонд Mariner 9 прислал на Землю первое фото типичного астероида, и тот оказался чем-то вроде изрытой кратерами картофелины. До этого момента астрономы, как и все остальные, рассчитывали увидеть аккуратный шар, просто поменьше размером, чем Земля или Марс, — как на иллюстрациях в книге Экзюпери, разве что без розы и барашка.

Год назад Международный астрономический союз назвал в честь Манро один из астероидов — 4942 Munroe. Если он врежется в Землю, то вызовет ветер со скоростью в 500 и больше миль в час, способный поднять динозавра в верхние слои атмосферы, уточняет Манро на сайте книги. Всякое случается, поэтому на некоторые вопросы лучше узнать ответы до этого события.

What if randall munroe

Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT

2014 • BOSTON • NEW YORK

Copyright © 2014 by xkcd Inc.

all rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Munroe, Randall, author.

What if? : serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions / Randall Munroe.

isbn 978-0-544-27299-6 (hardback)

isbn 978-0-544-45686-0 (international pbk.)

1. Science—Miscellanea. I. Title.

Book design by Christina Gleason

Lyrics from “If I Didn’t Have You” © 2011 by Tim Minchin.

Reprinted by permission of Tim Minchin.

Spent Fuel Pool [>]

Weird (and Worrying) Questions from the What If? Inbox, #1 [>]

New York–Style Time Machine [>]

Periodic Wall of the Elements [>]

A Mole of Moles [>]

Weird (and Worrying) Questions from the What If? Inbox, #2 [>]

The Last Human Light [>]

Weird (and Worrying) Questions from the What If? Inbox, #3 [>]

Weird (and Worrying) Questions from the What If? Inbox, #4 [>]

Glass Half Empty [>]

Weird (and Worrying) Questions from the What If? Inbox, #5 [>]

Weird (and Worrying) Questions from the What If? Inbox, #6 [>]

Falling with Helium [>]

Weird (and Worrying) Questions from the What If? Inbox, #7 [>]

Weird (and Worrying) Questions from the What If? Inbox, #8 [>]

Weird (and Worrying) Questions from the What If? Inbox, #9 [>]

Drain the Oceans [>]

Drain the Oceans: Part II [>]

Random Sneeze Call [>]

Weird (and Worrying) Questions from the What If? Inbox, #10 [>]

Updating a Printed Wikipedia [>]

Facebook of the Dead [>]

Sunset on the British Empire [>]

All the Lightning [>]

Weird (and Worrying) Questions from the What If? Inbox, #11 [>]

Weird (and Worrying) Questions from the What If? Inbox, #12 [>]

Do not try any of this at home. The author of this book is an Internet cartoonist, not a health or safety expert. He likes it when things catch fire or explode, which means he does not have your best interests in mind. The publisher and the author disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects resulting, directly or indirectly, from information contained in this book.

This book is a collection of answers to hypothetical questions.

These questions were submitted to me through my website, where—in addition to serving as a sort of Dear Abby for mad scientists—I draw xkcd, a stick-figure webcomic.

I didn’t start out making comics. I went to school for physics, and after graduating, I worked on robotics at NASA. I eventually left NASA to draw comics full-time, but my interest in science and math didn’t fade. Eventually, it found a new outlet: answering the Internet’s weird—and sometimes worrying—questions. This book contains a selection of my favorite answers from my website, plus a bunch of new questions answered here for the first time.

I’ve been using math to try to answer weird questions for as long as I can remember. When I was five years old, my mother had a conversation with me that she wrote down and saved in a photo album. When she heard I was writing this book, she found the transcript and sent it to me. Here it is, reproduced verbatim from her 25-year-old sheet of paper:

Randall: Are there more soft things or hard things in our house?

Julie: I don’t know.

Randall: How about in the world?

Julie: I don’t know.

Randall: Well, each house has three or four pillows, right?

Randall: And each house has about 15 magnets, right?

Randall: So 15 plus 3 or 4, let’s say 4, is 19, right?

Julie: I guess hard things.

To this day I have no idea where I got “3 billion” and “5 billion” from. Clearly, I didn’t really get how numbers worked.

My math has gotten a little better over the years, but my reason for doing math is the same as it was when I was five: I want to answer questions.

They say there are no stupid questions. That’s obviously wrong; I think my question about hard and soft things, for example, is pretty stupid. But it turns out that trying to thoroughly answer a stupid question can take you to some pretty interesting places.

I still don’t know whether there are more hard or soft things in the world, but I’ve learned a lot of other stuff along the way. What follows are my favorite parts of that journey.

Q. What would happen if the Earth and all terrestrial objects suddenly stopped spinning, but the atmosphere retained its velocity?

A. Nearly everyone would die. Then things would get inter­esting.

At the equator, the Earth’s surface is moving at about 470 meters per second—a little over a thousand miles per hour
—relative to its axis. If the Earth stopped and the air didn’t, the result would be a sudden thousand-mile-per-hour wind.

The wind would be highest at the equator, but everyone and everything living between 42 degrees north and 42 degrees south—which includes about 85 percent of the world’s population—would suddenly experience supersonic winds.

The highest winds would last for only a few minutes near the surface; friction with the ground would slow them down. However, those few minutes would be long enough to reduce virtually all human structures to ruins.

My home in Boston is far enough north to be just barely outside the supersonic wind zone, but the winds there would still be twice as strong as those in the most powerful tornadoes. Buildings, from sheds to skyscrapers, would be smashed flat, torn from their foundations, and sent tumbling across the landscape.

Winds would be lower near the poles, but no human cities are far enough from the equator to escape devastation. Longyearbyen, on the island of Svalbard in Norway—the highest-latitude city on the planet—would be devastated by winds equal to those in the planet’s strongest tropical cyclones.

If you’re going to wait it out, one of the best places to do it might be Helsinki, Finland. While its high latitude—above 60°N—wouldn’t be enough to keep it from being scoured clean by the winds, the bedrock below Helsinki contains a sophisticated network of tunnels, along with a subterranean shopping mall, hockey rink, swimming complex, and more.

No buildings would be safe; even structures strong enough to survive the winds would be in trouble. As comedian Ron White said about hurricanes, “It’s not that the wind is blowing, it’s what the wind is blowing.”

Say you’re in a massive bunker made out of some material that can withstand thousand-mile-per-hour winds.

The human race wouldn’t go extinct.1 In general, very few people above the surface would survive; the flying debris would pulverize anything that wasn’t nuclear-hardened. However, a lot of people below the surface of the ground would survive just fine. If you were in a deep basement (or, better yet, a subway tunnel) when it happened, you would stand a good chance of surviving.

There would be other lucky survivors. The dozens of scientists and staff at the Amundsen–Scott research station at the South Pole would be safe from the winds. For them, the first sign of trouble would be that the outside world had suddenly gone silent.

The mysterious silence would probably distract them for a while, but eventually someone would notice something even stranger:

As the surface winds died down, things would get weirder.

The wind blast would translate to a heat blast. Normally, the kinetic energy of rushing wind is small enough to be negligible, but this would not be normal wind. As it tumbled to a turbulent stop, the air would heat up.

Over land, this would lead to scorching temperature increases and—in areas where the air is moist—global thunderstorms.

At the same time, wind sweeping over the oceans would churn up and atomize the surface layer of the water. For a while, the ocean would cease to have a surface at all; it would be impossible to tell where the spray ended and the sea began.

Oceans are cold. Below the thin surface layer, they’re a fairly uniform 4°C. The tempest would churn up cold water from the depths. The influx of cold spray into superheated air would create a type of weather never before seen on Earth—a roiling mix of wind, spray, fog, and rapid temperature changes.

This upwelling would lead to blooms of life, as fresh nutrients flooded the upper layers. At the same time, it would lead to huge die-offs of fish, crabs, sea turtles, and animals unable to cope with the influx of low-oxygen water from the depths. Any animal that needs to breathe—such as whales and dolphins—would be hard-pressed to survive in the turbulent sea-air interface.

The waves would sweep around the globe, east to west, and every east-facing shore would encounter the largest storm surge in world history. A blinding cloud of sea spray would sweep inland, and behind it, a turbulent, roiling wall of water would advance like a tsunami. In some places, the waves would reach many miles inland.

The windstorms would inject huge amounts of dust and debris into the atmosphere. At the same time, a dense blanket of fog would form over the cold ocean surfaces. Normally, this would cause global temperatures to plummet. And they would.

At least, on one side of the Earth.

If the Earth stopped spinning, the normal cycle of day and night would end. The Sun wouldn’t completely stop moving across the sky, but instead of rising and setting once a day, it would rise and set once a year.

Day and night would each be six months long, even at the equator. On the day side, the surface would bake under the constant sunlight, while on the night side the temperature would plummet. Convection on the day side would lead to massive storms in the area directly beneath the Sun.2

In some ways, this Earth would resemble one of the tidally locked exoplanets commonly found in a red dwarf star’s habitable zone, but a better comparison might be a very early Venus. Due to its rotation, Venus—like our stopped Earth—keeps the same face pointed toward the Sun for months at a time. However, its thick atmosphere circulates quite quickly, which results in the day and the night side having about the same temperature.

Although the length of the day would change, the length of the month would not! The Moon hasn’t stopped rotating around the Earth. However, without the Earth’s rotation feeding it tidal energy, the Moon would stop drifting away from the Earth (as it is doing currently) and would start to slowly drift back toward us.

1 I mean, not right away.

2 Although without the Coriolis force, it’s anyone’s guess which way they would spin.

3 See “Leap Seconds,” http://what-if.xkcd.com/26, for an explanation of why this happens.

Q. What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light?

Let’s set aside the question of how we got the baseball moving that fast. We’ll suppose it’s a normal pitch, except in the instant the pitcher releases the ball, it magically accelerates to 0.9c. From that point onward, everything proceeds according to normal physics.

A. The answer turns out to be “a lot of things,” and they all happen very quickly, and it doesn’t end well for the batter (or the pitcher). I sat down with some physics books, a Nolan Ryan action figure, and a bunch of videotapes of nuclear tests and tried to sort it all out. What follows is my best guess at a nanosecond-by-nanosecond portrait.

The ball would be going so fast that everything else would be practically stationary. Even the molecules in the air would stand still. Air molecules would vibrate back and forth at a few hundred miles per hour, but the ball would be moving through them at 600 million miles per hour. This means that as far as the ball is concerned, they would just be hanging there, frozen.

The ideas of aerodynamics wouldn’t apply here. Normally, air would flow around anything moving through it. But the air molecules
in front of this ball wouldn’t have time to be jostled out of the way. The ball would smack into them so hard that the atoms in the air molecules would actually fuse with the atoms in the ball’s surface. Each collision would release a burst of gamma rays and scattered particles.1

These gamma rays and debris would expand outward in a bubble centered on the pitcher’s mound. They would start to tear apart the molecules in the air, ripping the electrons from the nuclei and turning the air in the stadium into an expanding bubble of incandescent plasma. The wall of this bubble would approach the batter at about the speed of light—only slightly ahead of the ball itself.

The constant fusion at the front of the ball would push back on it, slowing it down, as if the ball were a rocket flying tail-first while firing its engines. Unfortunately, the ball would be going so fast that even the tremendous force from this ongoing thermonuclear explosion would barely slow it down at all. It would, however, start to eat away at the surface, blasting tiny fragments of the ball in all directions. These fragments would be going so fast that when they hit air molecules, they would trigger two or three more rounds of fusion.

After about 70 nanoseconds the ball would arrive at home plate. The batter wouldn’t even have seen the pitcher let go of the ball, since the light carrying that information would arrive at about the same time the ball would. Collisions with the air would have eaten the ball away almost completely, and it would now be a bullet-shaped cloud of expanding plasma (mainly carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen) ramming into the air and triggering more fusion as it went. The shell of x-rays would hit the batter first, and a handful of nanoseconds later the debris cloud would hit.

When it would reach home plate, the center of the cloud would still be moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. It would hit the bat first, but then the batter, plate, and catcher would all be scooped up and carried backward through the backstop as they disintegrated. The shell of x-rays and superheated plasma would expand outward and upward, swallowing the backstop, both teams, the stands, and the surrounding neighborhood—all in the first microsecond.

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

Randall Munroe

From the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, hilarious and informative answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask.

Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe’s iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have a large and passionate following.

Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions. What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? If there was a robot apocalypse, how long would humanity last?

In pursuit of answers, Munroe runs computer…

Лучшая рецензия на книгу

15 марта 2022 г. 09:23

Внимание! Планируется к выпуску вторая часть книги! Ждем перевода на русский язык.

Год издания: 2014

Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (September 2, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0544272994
ISBN-13: 978-0544272996
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.9 x 1.5 inches

Возрастные ограничения: 12+

Рецензии

15 марта 2022 г. 09:23

Внимание! Планируется к выпуску вторая часть книги! Ждем перевода на русский язык.

13 марта 2021 г. 21:46

DISCLAIMER: Do not try any of this at home. The author of this book is an Internet cartoonist, not a health or safety expert. He likes it when things catch fire or explode, which means he does not have your best interests in mind.

‘What If’ There Were An Entire Book Devoted To Absurd Hypotheticals?

‘What If’ There Were An Entire Book Devoted To Absurd Hypotheticals?

Randall Munroe/Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Simple questions can lead to very complicated answers. For instance: What if everyone actually had just one soul mate — one random person somewhere in the world? Could they ever meet?

«You know, there are a lot more people who have been alive than who are alive right now. So if your soul mate is randomly assigned from all humans, it’s probably somebody who is already dead or who has not yet been born.»

That’s Randall Munroe talking to NPR’s Lynn Neary. (Munroe makes a living answering questions like this.) To simplify the problem, he says we can narrow the eligible population down to living humans close in age. But even assuming love at first sight, he says the odds are pretty slim:

«I imagined a system of, like, everyone would get on these treadmills and they’d be swept past each other. You know, you’d get the whole population of the Earth going past each other making eye contact as they go with as many people as they can, just taking a moment to go: ‘Yes. Yes. No. No. Yes. No. No. No.’ «

Of course, this would take some time. «If everyone spent eight hours a day, 365 days a year on this,» Munroe says, «you could in theory pair up everybody with their soul mate within a few decades.»

Munroe started his career as a NASA roboticist, then created the popular web comic xkcd. On the side, he uses his mathematical mind to answer outlandish questions from his readers. His new book is called What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions.

Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

by Randall Munroe

Hardcover, 303 pages |

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On the best kinds of outlandish questions

And so I wrote an article, you know, explaining to her, you know, if you try to build a building progressively higher, here are the problems you’re gonna run into: eventually it gets so tall, you know, that it collapses; but then you figure out a way to build it stronger; but then it gets so tall that it’s sticking out into orbit and satellites start colliding with it. You know, and then it takes you through all these different interesting physics ideas.

On whether his scientific answers take the fun out of a question’s fantasy

A couple of different people have tackled this — you know, said, «Oh, if everyone jumped at once in one place would it disrupt the Earth’s orbit or something?» And the answer to that is a little bit disappointing, which is that not a lot would happen.

«Earth outweighs us by a factor of over ten trillion,» Munroe writes. «On average, we humans can vertically jump maybe half a meter on a good day. Even if the Earth were rigid and responded instantly, it would be pushed down by less than an atom’s width.» Randall Munroe/Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt hide caption

«Earth outweighs us by a factor of over ten trillion,» Munroe writes. «On average, we humans can vertically jump maybe half a meter on a good day. Even if the Earth were rigid and responded instantly, it would be pushed down by less than an atom’s width.»

Randall Munroe/Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I thought, well, there’s not a lot I can say about that, but then I started wondering, like, wait a minute, you’ve gathered everyone in the world in one place, magically, that’s the premise of the question; but then what happens?

After the jump, Munroe writes, «There are a lot of uncomfortable glances. Someone coughs.» Randall Munroe/Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt hide caption

After the jump, Munroe writes, «There are a lot of uncomfortable glances. Someone coughs.»

Randall Munroe/Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

And I started trying to figure out if you gathered everyone, you know, in Rhode Island — they would take up an area about the size of Rhode Island — then, you know, how many people can get out of Rhode Island per hour? What’s the capacity of all the ports — you know, the airports, the ships? How many cars are there in Rhode Island? And then it turns out the rate is not that high, so it brings you to another question, which is how much food is there in Rhode Island? Because there’s no one working the farms to supply more food to Rhode Island because everyone is already in Rhode Island. It turns out, within a matter of a couple of weeks, Rhode Island would be the graveyard of most of the human race in this scenario.

On the «weird and worrying» questions he includes in the book but doesn’t answer, like «How fast would a human have to run in order to be cut in half at the belly button by a cheese-cutting wire?»

Yeah, that’s in a category of question that I haven’t answered because I don’t want to think about that. It’s just like — my skin crawls imagining that. Another question like that was, «How cold would your teeth have to get in order for a cup of hot coffee to make them shatter on contact?» And that’s a question I’ve never gotten past just the initial mental image.

On his own what-if questions