À quelle altitude faut-il lâcher un steak pour qu'il arrive cuit au sol ? Qu'adviendrait-il de notre planète si le Soleil s'éteignait d'un coup ? Et si tous les Terriens sautaient en l'air et retombaient en même temps ? Combien de temps pourriez-vous nager dans une piscine emplie des déchets nucléaires ? Quelle puissance Yoda, le héros de la Guerre des étoiles, développe-t-il ?
Peut-on imaginer de répondre de façon sérieuse à des questions aussi loufoques ? C'est le pari de Randall Munroe qui, pour rédiger ce livre, n'a pas hésité à éplucher des montagnes de notes déclassifiées de l'armée américaine, à interviewer des ingénieurs nucléaires, à appeler 10 fois de suite sa vieille mère à la rescousse et à « googler » des animaux très très bizarres !
Le résultat ? Un bijou de vulgarisation scientifique aux comics trips hilarants, où l'auteur parvient à calculer et à expliquer l'impossible, depuis la probabilité de rencontrer votre âme soeur jusqu'aux terribles symptômes dont vous souffririez si votre ADN venait subitement à disparaître.
Bref, un remue-méninges inouï, enfin disponible en français après être longtemps resté n°1 de la liste des best-sellers du New York Times
Le guide le plus réjouissant et le plus inutile de la planète.
Dans son premier opus, Randall Munroe résolvait les questions les plus saugrenues avec toute la rigueur possible (dont l'indispensable : à quelle altitude faut-il lâcher un steak pour qu'il atterrisse cuit au sol ?).
Son nouveau défi, tout aussi hilarant, procède en sens inverse : inventer les réponses les plus délirantes aux questions de tous les jours.
Jugez plutôt !
Comment être sûr de votre année de naissance ?
En mesurant la radioactivité de vos dents...
Comment savoir s'il va faire beau demain ?
En repérant les couchers de soleil rougeâtres sur les photos en ligne...
Comment traverser une rivière à gué ?
En faisant évaporer l'eau...
Appelant à la rescousse Serena Williams (Comment abattre un drone) ou l'astronaute Chris Hadfield (Comment réussir un atterrissage d'urgence), Randall Munroe nous montre qu'il est toujours plus amusant de faire compliqué quand on peut faire simple. Un summum de la vulgarisation scientifique.
WHAT IF... one man decided to answer all the unanswerable questions, using science. The Sunday Times -bestselling author and xkcd creator, Randall Munroe is here to provides the best answers yet to the important questions you probably never thought to ask The millions of people around the world who read and loved What If? still have questions, and those questions are getting stranger. Planning to ride a fire pole from the moon back to Earth? The hardest part is sticking to the landing. Hoping to cool the atmosphere by opening everyone''s freezer doors at the same time? Maybe it''s time for a brief introduction to thermodynamics. Want to know what would happen if you rode a helicopter blade, built a billion-storey building, made a lava lamp out of lava, or jumped on a geyser as it erupted? Okay, if you insist. Welcome (back) to the mind-blowing world of What If? Unfazed by absurdity, Randall consults the latest research on everything from swing-set physics to airplane-catapult design to clearly and concisely answer his readers'' questions. As he consistently demonstrates, you can learn a lot from examining how the world might work in very specific extreme circumstances. Filled with bonkers science, boundless curiosity, and Randall''s signature stick-figure comics, What If? 2 is sure to be another instant classic adored by inquisitive readers of all ages.
The world's most entertaining and useless self-help guide, from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd and the million-selling What If? and Thing Explainer For any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally bad that no one would ever try it. How To is a guide to the third kind of approach. It's full of highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole. Bestselling author and cartoonist Randall Munroe explains how to predict the weather by analyzing the pixels of your Facebook photos. He teaches you how to tell if you're a baby boomer or a millennial by measuring the radioactivity of your teeth. He offers tips for taking a selfie with a telescope, crossing a river by boiling it, and getting to your appointments on time by destroying the moon. And if you want to get rid of this book once you're done with it, he walks you through your options for proper disposal, including dissolving it in the ocean, converting it to a vapour, using tectonic plates to subduct it into the Earth's mantle, or launching it into the sun. By exploring the most complicated ways to do simple tasks, Munroe doesn't just make things difficult for himself and his readers. As he did so brilliantly in What If? , he invites us to explore the most absurd reaches of the possible. Full of clever infographics and amusing illustrations, How To is a delightfully mind-bending way to better understand the science and technology underlying the things we do every day.
''Nerd royalty'' Ben Goldacre ''Laugh-out-loud funny'' Bill Gates ''Totally brilliant'' Tim Harford WHAT IF you still had so many more strange questions about the universe?
And WHAT IF Randall Munroe, former NASA roboticist and xkcd creator, were prepared to move mountains, fill the solar system with soup and alter the space-time continuum to answer them?
Whether it''s how to make a lava lamp out of lava or feeding the inhabitants of New York to a T. Rex, welcome to the weird, wonderful (and sometimes terrifying) world of WHAT IF? 2
@2@From the creator of the wildly popular xkcd.com, hilarious and informative answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask.@3@@2@Millions visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe's iconic webcomic. Fans ask him a lot of strange questions: How fast can you hit a speed bump, driving, and live? When (if ever) did the sun go down on the British Empire? When will Facebook contain more profiles of dead people than living? How many humans would a T Rex rampaging through New York need to eat a day?@3@@2@In pursuit of answers, Munroe runs computer simulations, pores over stacks of declassified military research memos, solves differential equations and consults nuclear reactor operators. His responses are masterpieces of clarity and hilarity, complemented by comics. They often predict the complete annihilation of humankind, or at least a really big explosion.@3@
For any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally bad that no one would ever try it. How To is a guide to the third kind of approach. It's full of highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole. Bestselling author and cartoonist Randall Munroe explains how to predict the weather by analyzing the pixels of your Facebook photos. He teaches you how to tell if you're a baby boomer or a millennial by measuring the radioactivity of your teeth. He offers tips for taking a selfie with a telescope, crossing a river by boiling it, and getting to your appointments on time by destroying the moon. And if you want to get rid of this book once you're done with it, he walks you through your options for proper disposal, including dissolving it in the ocean, converting it to a vapour, using tectonic plates to subduct it into the Earth's mantle, or launching it into the sun. By exploring the most complicated ways to do simple tasks, Munroe doesn't just make things difficult for himself and his readers. As he did so brilliantly in What If? , he invites us to explore the most absurd reaches of the possible. Full of clever infographics and amusing illustrations, How To is a delightfully mind-bending way to better understand the science and technology underlying the things we do every day.
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER From the creator of the wildly popular xkcd.com, hilarious and informative answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask. Millions visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe's iconic webcomic. Fans ask him a lot of strange questions: How fast can you hit a speed bump, driving, and live? When (if ever) did the sun go down on the British Empire? When will Facebook contain more profiles of dead people than living? How many humans would a T Rex rampaging through New York need to eat a day? In pursuit of answers, Munroe runs computer simulations, pores over stacks of declassified military research memos, solves differential equations and consults nuclear reactor operators. His responses are masterpieces of clarity and hilarity, complemented by comics. They often predict the complete annihilation of humankind, or at least a really big explosion.
