What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
Randall Munroe
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Removing Japan would also have a big effect on ocean currents.”
“It might seem confusing that someone navigating toward Earth’s north pole would be attracted to the MRI’s south pole, but that’s because the Earth’s pole names are backward. The “north” end of a magnet is the one that points toward the Earth’s north pole, which means the Earth’s north magnetic pole is technically a south magnetic pole, and vice versa. This is deeply annoying to me, but there’s nothing we can do about it, so we might as well move on.”
“* If you drink all of someone’s blood, there’s a 100 percent chance that they’ll die.”
“in human populations, 60 percent of humans who had any children at all ended up in the family tree permanently, and 73 percent of people who survived to adulthood had children.”
“You’d also run into problems scaling up the retina—if you made the individual cells bigger, they’d no longer be able to detect visible light wavelengths.”
“This plan has some flaws. It destroys the Earth, yes, but it’s also unnecessarily inefficient.”
“The “north” end of a magnet is the one that points toward the Earth’s north pole, which means the Earth’s north magnetic pole is technically a south magnetic pole, and vice versa.”
“Q What is the average size for every man-made object on the planet? —Max Carver Not too big, not too small. About average.”
“In 1956, oceanographer Henry Stommel suggested that, because of differences in temperature and salinity between the surface and the deep ocean, if you connect the surface and the deep ocean with a tube and push water through it, it might continue flowing indefinitely.”
“If you built an iPhone with vacuum tubes instead of transistors, packed together with the same density as they were in UNIVAC, the phone would be about the size of five city blocks when resting on one edge. Conversely, if you built the original UNIVAC out of iPhone-size components, the entire machine would be less than 300 microns tall, small enough to embed inside a single grain of salt.”
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