muze 's review for:

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe

4.5

informative lighthearted medium-paced

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Excellent for what it is!  Short chapters answering bizarre but common questions like “if we dug a hole through the center if the earth and jumped in, what would happen?”, physics and mathematics usually included.  So it’s not literature, and it’s not a series of “Scientific American” articles, but it’s somewhere in between.  The author (famous for the XKCD comic strip) is funny, clever, sarcastic, snarky, and clearly a nerd (all good for me).  

I found most of it interesting and funny.  Some was over my head, and some just weren’t interesting questions to me.  But most was great!

I felt that way about Cecil Adam’s’ “The Straight Dope,” too.  It’s a decent analog.