
What If?
Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
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Narrated by:
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Wil Wheaton
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By:
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Randall Munroe
About this listen
From the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd comes this hilarious and informative book of answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask.
Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe's iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have a large and passionate following. Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions. What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent of the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? If there were a robot apocalypse, how long would humanity last?
In pursuit of answers, Munroe runs computer simulations, pores over stacks of declassified military research memos, solves differential equations, and consults with nuclear reactor operators. His responses are masterpieces of clarity and hilarity, complemented by signature xkcd comics. They often predict the complete annihilation of humankind, or at least a really big explosion.
The book features new and never-before-answered questions, along with updated and expanded versions of the most popular answers from the xkcd website. What If? will be required listening for xkcd fans and anyone who loves to ponder the hypothetical.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2014 Randall Munroe (P)2014 Blackstone AudiobookListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
History is the most dangerous place on earth. From dinosaurs the size of locomotives to meteors big enough to sterilize the planet, from famines to pandemics, from tornadoes to the Chicxulub asteroid, the odds of human survival are slim but not zero—at least, not if you know where to go and what to do. In each chapter of How to Survive History, Cody Cassidy explores how to survive one of history’s greatest threats: getting eaten by dinosaurs, being destroyed by the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, succumbing to the lava flows of Pompeii, being devoured by the Donner Party, and more.
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A fun, light romp
- By Ron on 03-11-24
By: Cody Cassidy
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Stuff You Should Know
- An Incomplete Compendium of Mostly Interesting Things
- By: Josh Clark, Chuck Bryant
- Narrated by: Chuck Bryant, Josh Clark
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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From the duo behind the massively successful and award-winning podcast Stuff You Should Know comes an unexpected look at things you thought you knew. Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant started the podcast Stuff You Should Know back in 2008 because they were curious - curious about the world around them, curious about what they might have missed in their formal educations, and curious to dig deeper on stuff they thought they understood.
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Fails as an audio book.
- By Sarah H on 12-10-20
By: Josh Clark, and others
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Napoleon's Hemorrhoids…And Other Small Events That Changed History
- By: Phil Mason
- Narrated by: LJ Ganser
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Hilarious, fascinating, and a roller coaster of dizzying, historical what-ifs, Napoleon's Hemorrhoids is a potpourri for serious historians and casual history buffs. In one of Phil Mason's many revelations, you'll learn that Communist jets were two minutes away from opening fire on American planes during the Cuban missile crisis, when they had to turn back as they were running out of fuel. You'll discover that before the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon's painful hemorrhoids prevented him from mounting his horse to survey the battlefield.
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They just throw the facts too fast
- By Concerned_llama on 12-11-20
By: Phil Mason
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Alan Partridge: Nomad
- By: Alan Partridge
- Narrated by: Alan Partridge
- Length: 6 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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In Alan Partridge: Nomad, Alan dons his boots, windcheater and scarf and embarks on an odyssey through a place he once knew - it's called Britain - intent on completing a journey of immense personal significance. Diarising his ramble in the form of a 'journey journal', Alan details the people and places he encounters, ruminates on matters large and small and, on a final leg fraught with danger, becomes not a man (because he was one to start off with) but a better, more inspiring example of a man.
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Pointlessness is the point
- By Michael on 10-21-16
By: Alan Partridge
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A Short History of Nearly Everything
- By: Bill Bryson
- Narrated by: Richard Matthews
- Length: 18 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Bill Bryson has been an enormously popular author both for his travel books and for his books on the English language. Now, this beloved comic genius turns his attention to science. Although he doesn't know anything about the subject (at first), he is eager to learn, and takes information that he gets from the world's leading experts and explains it to us in a way that makes it exciting and relevant.
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The Only Book I reread imediatley after reading
- By Andrew on 11-09-09
By: Bill Bryson
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Who Ate the First Oyster?
- The Extraordinary People Behind the Greatest Firsts in History
- By: Cody Cassidy
- Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris
- Length: 4 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Who wore the first pants? Who painted the first masterpiece? Who first rode the horse? Who invented soap? This madcap adventure across ancient history uses everything from modern genetics to archaeology to uncover the geniuses behind these and other world-changing innovations. With a sharp sense of humor and boundless enthusiasm for the wonders of our ancient ancestors, Who Ate the First Oyster? profiles the perpetrators of the greatest firsts and catastrophes of prehistory.
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It could be better...
- By Alex on 04-06-21
By: Cody Cassidy
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The Physics of Everyday Things
- The Extraordinary Science Behind an Ordinary Day
- By: James Kakalios
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 5 hrs
- Unabridged
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Most of us are clueless when it comes to the physics that makes our modern world so convenient. What's the simple science behind motion sensors, touch screens, and toasters? How do we glide through tolls using an E-ZPass or find our way to new places using GPS? In The Physics of Everyday Things, James Kakalios takes us on an amazing journey into the subatomic marvels that underlie so much of what we use and take for granted.
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Computer-generated text, read by a robot; joyless
- By Viola DaGamba on 12-01-22
By: James Kakalios
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The World Until Yesterday
- What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?
- By: Jared Diamond
- Narrated by: Jay Snyder
- Length: 18 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional societies still or recently in existence.
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A visit with our ancient ancestors
- By BRB on 01-30-13
By: Jared Diamond
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Ten Drugs
- How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine
- By: Thomas Hager
- Narrated by: Angelo Di Loreto
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Beginning with opium, the “joy plant,” which has been used for 10,000 years, Thomas Hager tells a captivating story of medicine. His subjects include the largely forgotten female pioneer who introduced smallpox inoculation to Britain, the infamous knockout drops, the first antibiotic, which saved countless lives, the first antipsychotic, which helped empty public mental hospitals, Viagra, statins, and the new frontier of monoclonal antibodies. This is a deep, wide-ranging, and wildly entertaining book.
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Engrossing to physicians & lay persons alike
- By C. White on 03-08-19
By: Thomas Hager
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Prepare to Meet Thy Doom
- And More True Gaming Stories
- By: David Kushner
- Narrated by: Wil Wheaton
- Length: 5 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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From Masters of Doom author David Kushner comes Prepare to Meet Thy Doom, a compilation of true gaming stories covering many facets of America's biggest entertainment business: the video game industry. In addition to more than a dozen fascinating tales of game creation, play, business, and controversy, Prepare to Meet Thy Doom follows up on Kushner's previous best seller, Masters of Doom, with a long-awaited update.
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An interesting and unsorted collection
- By Greg on 11-05-15
By: David Kushner
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Humble Pi
- When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World
- By: Matt Parker
- Narrated by: Matt Parker
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Exploring and explaining a litany of glitches, near misses, and mathematical mishaps involving the internet, big data, elections, street signs, lotteries, the Roman Empire, and an Olympic team, Matt Parker uncovers the bizarre ways math trips us up, and what this reveals about its essential place in our world. Getting it wrong has never been more fun.
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Fascinating & enlightening even for da mathphobic✏️
- By C. White on 01-23-20
By: Matt Parker
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There Are (No) Stupid Questions … in Science
- By: Leah Elson MS MPH
- Narrated by: Leah Elson MS MPH
- Length: 5 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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In the vein of Randall Munroe’s What If? and perfect for fans of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, Leah Elson’s There Are No Stupid Questions … in Science covers biology, chemistry, physics, human physiology, and space—providing easy-to-understand, delightfully cheeky answers to over one hundred common questions, from the age-old, to the ridiculous, to the sublime.
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Geared towards young adults, adults with no science/math background
- By MRS.Denning on 04-16-25
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Hyperspace
- A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension
- By: Michio Kaku
- Narrated by: Tim Lounibos
- Length: 14 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Are there other dimensions beyond our own? Is time travel possible? Can we change the past? Are there gateways to parallel universes? All of us have pondered such questions, but there was a time when scientists dismissed these notions as outlandish speculations. Not any more. Today, they are the focus of the most intense scientific activity in recent memory. In Hyperspace, Michio Kaku offers the first book-length tour of the most exciting (and perhaps most bizarre) work in modern physics.
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is there nothing really interesting to talk about in higher-dimensional physics?
- By Ari on 12-17-23
By: Michio Kaku
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Failure Is an Option
- An Attempted Memoir
- By: H. Jon Benjamin
- Narrated by: H. Jon Benjamin
- Length: 4 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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While he's not quite a household name, most people would consider H. Jon Benjamin, the voice-actor star of Archer and Bob's Burgers (and a sentient can of mixed vegetables in 2015's Wet Hot American Summer) a comedy show business success. But he'd like to remind everyone that as great as success can be, failure is also an option. In a hilarious, self-deprecating memoir, Jon lays out some of his many failures in all areas of life, from Work ("wherein I'm unable to deliver a sizzling fajita") to Family ("wherein a trip to PF Chang's fractures a family").
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No joke, This book helped my marriage
- By Michelle on 05-07-18
By: H. Jon Benjamin
What's fun about this book is how really crazy-sounding Randall Munroe's answers are—but what's great about it is how serious is the science. In a way, the entire book is a lesson in how to think scientifically without losing your sense of humor. Just the kind of thing that would have Richard Feynman falling out of his chair, laughing.
To be honest, this book is so completely zany you might want to take it in smaller bites, like I did. That said, bring it on. It's great entertainment for anyone with a wry sense of humor. Also ideal for a high school student who just needs a tiny nudge in a scientific direction, or—for that matter, any high school student.
Plus, Wil Wheaton is at the top of his form. His narration is absolutly perfect. He's energetic, lucid, and truly brilliant. And this book is the ideal showcase for his considerable talent. For fans of Wil, he's also fabulous narrating "Ready Player One," by Ernest Cline, and this narration is every bit as excellent.
A humorous lesson in how to think—Brilliantly read
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Great read(or listen)
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At its best, the book answers creative questions about combining unlikely or impossible creative scenarios. At other times, the questions are just matters of superlatives which can get stale. In all cases though, Munroe's answers and Wheaton's readings are entertaining, informative, and satisfying.
Mad science
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Just awesome!
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Entertaining book
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Perfect narrator
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Laugh Out Loud Funny
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What made the experience of listening to What If? the most enjoyable?
Learning what interesting facts can come from simple/foolish questions.Have you listened to any of Wil Wheaton’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
This material was tailor-made for Wil's dry wit and sense of humor. It brought out all the charm but all the detail.Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
Yes. Had to go out of my way NOT to do so.Any additional comments?
Overall a four only because of length.Wishing it was longer. Wil Wheaton excellent
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good science <br />not audio book material
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A true Phenom
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