Randall Munroe Asks, ‘What If?’
16:57 minutes
In 2012, xkcd comic artist (and former NASA roboticist) Randall Munroe took on a new challenge: answering his readers’ zany hypothetical queries with math and science. That regular online column is now a book, titled What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. Munroe tells Ira what happens if you hit a baseball at 90 percent the speed of light, and explains why he definitely shouldn’t go diving in a spent nuclear fuel pool. (Read an excerpt here.)
Segment Guests
Randall Munroe
Randall Munroe is a comic artist, creator of xkcd.com, and author of Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015) and What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014). He’s based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Heard on the Air
Read an excerpt from What If?
Meet the Producer
About Annie Minoff
@annieminoffAnnie Minoff is a producer for The Journal from Gimlet Media and the Wall Street Journal, and a former co-host and producer of Undiscovered. She also plays the banjo.