XKCD.com has added a new feature to its website comics. There’s a new comic about “What if? Answering your hypothetical questions with physics, every Tuesday.”
Some of the topics have included:
- What if everyone actually had only one soul mate, a random person somewhere in the world?
- What would happen if everyone on earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same instant?
- Is there enough energy to move the entire current human population off-planet?
- What if there was a robot apocalypse? How long would humanity last?
- What would happen if you were to gather a mole(unit of measurement) of moles (the small furry critter) in one place?
- How much Force power can Yoda output?
- What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?
The answers are thoughtful yet funny explorations of such questions. The conclusion being somewhat snarky. I like the conclusion to the question “What if everyone who took the SAT guessed on every multiple-choice question? How many perfect scores would there be?”
This means that the odds of acing the SAT by guessing are worse than the odds of every living ex-President and every member of the main cast of Firefly all being independently struck by lightning … on the same day.”
Or the answer to “What if a glass of water was, all of a sudden, literally half empty?”
The lesson: If the optimist says the glass is half full, and the pessimist says the glass is half empty, the physicist ducks.”
Son has sent in his question to maybe be answered in the future: “What if everybody walked east, how long would it take before the world stopped spinning?” I like this series because it’s geeky and snarky.
