What If? by xkcd Author Randall Munroe: Bizarre and Hypothetical Science Questions Answered

If science had looked like this at school, then we'd have all become rocket scientists. Except Randall Munroe, who left NASA in order to write a webcomic.

But the loss to the robotics department at Langley Research Center is most definitely our gain.

70 million of us flock to read xkcd every month. It's one of the most wildly successful websites in cyberspace. Practically everyone I know can quote at least one quip from it.

My own introduction to the wryly humorous, brilliantly observed and compulsively educational world of Randall Munroe came in a comment to my old Runescape blog.

This was back in the mid to late noughties, when my gaming had brought me into contact with a player burning pixel swastikas into a digital floor. I'd blithely inquired as to whether he was a Hindu. He assured me that he was not.

I pondered into the text box that maybe the gentleman had never studied History, and therefore wasn't aware that the icon he was forming - in constant repetition - was once the symbol of Germany's Nazi Party, thus linked irrevocably in many minds with the Holocaust. He duly informed me that the Holocaust never happened and... blah... blah...

You can pretty much fill in the rest by factoring in the fact that I wasn't going to let it pass.

Let's just say that it went on for over half an hour, and left me incensed that no-one behind the dozens of avatars gracing the GE that day - witnesses to our clash of ideologies - spoke up in support of my stance. I took it to my blog. I ranted, I raved, I talked of silence meaning approval and despaired of the Youth of Today.

Then, in the midst of a veritable mob forming of my readers - half of them tracking the player down in game; the other half grabbing the pitchforks and burning torches - my good friend Egghebrecht posted his comment. It was the image embedded above. My first, and still my favorite, xkcd comic Duty Calls. 

I took the point and laughed, then followed the link back to Randall Munroe's website. Hours later, I'd totally forgotten about the Neo-Nazi in the MMORPG - and the indignant crowd unleashed upon him - because I was still giggling my way through the entire xkcd archive.

I've not really emerged in the intervening near decade. Which means that I've watched Randall Munroe's What If? blog bloom like a mushroom cloud detonated in gale-force winds. (Don't, is the short answer.)  It's definitely worth reading. All of it. And the book.

If I was to knock up a personal Top Ten Best xkcd Moments, you'd think they'd all be part of the comic strip.

There's so much going on which chimes with my own concerns - important stuff, like gaming, politics, media, tech support, velociraptors - that sometimes it feels like he's penning it all with me in mind as his target audience.

But my second favorite all time xkcd moment was featured in the What If? part of Randall's website.

This is a man who can even make math interesting and (on the surface at least) vital to know. There's no option but to be drawn in, when the topic itself is a good one. It's all that you ever wanted to know about science, but were too scared of the scientists to ask.

Randall encourages us to ask him anything. There's no withering disdain for the dreamers, the stoners, nor the liberal-arts types, whose grasp of science is shaky at best. He treats all hypothetical science questions as game on, and if it is possible to explore the possibilities, then it's downright challenge accepted.

The comic reproduced (above) gives a clue to what it was all about.

We all know that Americans can't grasp the rudiments of tea-making. But what if they were onto something, when they chose Boston Harbor over a tea-pot in their most famous attempt?  A surprising decision, so far out that it hadn't even entered left field, let alone come out of it. But progress is always made when humanity experiments with breaking the norm. Perhaps the tea brewing world missed a trick, when we decided to stay with the usual kettle and mug combo.

xkcd reader Alex Burman asked, and Randall Munroe explored the potential for lakes being transformed into the world's biggest cuppas.

Lake Tea was what the internet was built to host. Hilarious, brilliant flights of fancy coming one after another; short and sweet, yet with more citations than the average dissertation; teaching us about density, mass and energy in such an off-hand manner, that it took me months to realize that I'd even been exposed to Physics AND I understood it; chucking in legislation, history, sociology and mathematics too for good measure. Plus he illustrated it with xkcd type comics throughout.

It must have taken hours of research to produce just one nugget of pure internet gold.

Now Randall Munroe has given us a whole book of fabulously absurd scientific queries. Three hundred pages worth of hypotheses - all chucked into the mix by fans of xkcd - meticulously investigated, and concluded with humorous clarity.

Count me in.