XKCD creator Randall Munroe has announced that Houghton Mifflin will collect his amazing What If? science columns into a book called What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, to be published in September 2014. It will include in-depth answers to questions that he hasn’t yet answered online, as well as expanded and updated versions of his previous columns.
What If? is one of my Internet must-reads, and I look forward to each new installment, and always read it with delight.
See, for example: Fermi estimation, printing out Wikipedia, total possible English-language tweets, extinguishing the sun, murder by superball, Fedex vs file-transfers, cooking steak with freefall, a mole of moles, robot uprisings and relatavistic baseball.
As I’ve sifted through the letters submitted to What If every week, I’ve occasionally set aside particularly neat questions that I wanted to spend a little more time on. This book features my answers to those questions, along with revised and updated versions of some of my favorite articles from the site. (I’m also including my personal list of the weirdest questions people have submitted.)
What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions [Pre-order]
What if I wrote a book? [XKCD]