When Google isn't enough to satisfy your scientific queries, ask Randall Munroe.
The former NASA roboticist, 29, has built a cult following with his stick-figure webcomic xkcd as well as a blog answering his fans' most absurd and sometimes enlightening questions, from the Richter magnitude of Dallas Cowboys running into a wall to the consequences on Earth if the sun just turned off one day. (We'd all freeze and die, but before that, everyone's satellite service would totally rock.)
Munroe has collected a variety of scientific conundrums, problems and trivia - illustrated with his ever-present stick figures - in the new book What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. The brainy Massachusetts cartoonist talks with USA TODAY's Brian Truitt about his work, science and weird questions.
Q. What was your first love: science or comics?
A. I think science, because I've been interested in science in one way or another since I was a kid. But I can actually remember the moment when I read a comic for the first time (it was a Calvin and Hobbes strip). But before any of those, I remember I read a picture book about how houses were put together. It looked really fun, so I decided I wanted to be a 'House Builder.'
Q. How do you determine which questions to answer and what ends up in the 'weird and worrying' pile?
A. Every week, people send in far more questions than I could possibly answer, so there's a lot of sifting and sorting. After I've picked out the ones I have good answers for, there are often ones left over that I want to share even if I don't have an article to answer them.
Images are taken from the book 'What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions' by Randall Munroe.(Photo: xkcd)
Q. How long on average does it take you to figure one out?
A. Since I answer a question every week on my website, I generally don't get to spend more than a day or two on each one - although they can be pretty intense days.
Some of the questions in the book took longer. In particular, there was a question about what would happen if you tried to touch a small object - a bullet - that was as dense as a neutron star. I spent a lot of time calculating things like how close you could get before the bullet's gravity pulled your arm off, and what would happen to the blood vessels in your hand.
One thing I've gotten good at is doing lots of browsing really fast, finding and skimming 50 articles to find the three that have what I'm looking for. I've started keeping a collection of really strange research I've found that I haven't been able to use in an article yet.
Images are taken from the book 'What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions' by Randall Munroe.(Photo: xkcd)
Q. Is there a certain balance you've learned to strike between getting into the real down-and-dirty science stuff but also being accessible for laypeople?
A. I usually do all the research and calculation first, and once I've got an answer I'm satisfied with, I step back and decide which parts of it are interesting enough to write about and which parts are boring or not very relevant. It feels less like a balance between 'accessibility' and 'real science,' and more like a balance between 'boring science' and 'interesting science.'
Q. What is the weirdest question you've actually answered?
A. One of the weirder questions I've written an article about was 'What would happen if you were to gather a mole (unit of measurement) of moles (the small furry critter) in one place?' A mole (the number) is a unit equal to about 602,214,100,000,000,000,000,000, so if you gathered that many moles (the animal) together somewhere in space, their gravity would crush them into a sphere the size of the moon.
I think the weirdest question I've ever gotten was: 'If people had wheels, and could fly, how would we differentiate them from airplanes?'
Q. Compared to all the science research and fact-seeking, is the actual drawing part of your job pretty easy?
A. I have no artistic training - as you might have guessed from all the stick figures! - and there are a few things I have a really hard time drawing. I think the one that comes up the most is airplanes. Big airliners have such a weird wing shape, and I always have to redraw them 20 times before they're even recognizable.
Q. Do you ever miss working at NASA?
A. I feel like writing What If? gives me the best of both worlds. I get to work on fun questions and do lots of calculations, but they're all problems I've chosen myself. And since I get a completely new question every week, I don't have to work on anything long enough to get tired of it.
Randall Munroe's 'What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions' is based on his popular website xkcd.(Photo: None)
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Entities 0 Name: Randall Munroe Count: 4 1 Name: NASA Count: 2 2 Name: Munroe Count: 1 3 Name: Google Count: 1 4 Name: Brian Truitt Count: 1 5 Name: moon Count: 1 6 Name: Massachusetts Count: 1 7 Name: Earth Count: 1 8 Name: Dallas Cowboys Count: 1 Related 0 Url: http://ift.tt/ZgrWUr Title: WARNING: wild extrapolation (a classification system for science news) Description: Science news and science writing is increasingly popular. There are increasing numbers of people getting into science, which is great. But science is a huge field, with many different disciplines and areas, all of which can go into quite painstaking detail.
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