210 | Randall Munroe on Imagining What If...?
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Sean Carroll | Wondery
4.8 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 12 September 2022
⏱️ 68 minutes
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Summary
What’s the fastest way to get a human being around a racetrack, if we ignore all the rules of racing? How many pages would you have to read to absorb all of the government laws that apply to you? It’s hard to imagine a better person to tackle these kinds of slightly-askew questions than Randall Munroe, creator of the xkcd webcomic. He collected some answers in his book What If?, and has released a sequel, What If? 2. We dive into how one goes about choosing the right questions and answering them, and how to make it funny along the way.
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Randall Munroe received a degree in physics from Christopher Newport University, before working for a while at NASA’s Langley Research Center. He is now the creator of xkcd and the author of several books. What If? and What If? 2 are based on a regular feature in which he tackles questions asked by readers.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone and welcome to the Winescape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. |
| 0:04.0 | In certain corners of the internet, certainly ones that I find myself in all the time, |
| 0:08.5 | there's a saying that goes, there's an XKCD for everything. XKCD of course is the wildly |
| 0:15.3 | popular webcomic started in 2005 by today's guest, Randall Monroe, an XKCD's famous for many |
| 0:22.2 | things. It has a very austere minimalist art style featuring more or less stick figures, |
| 0:29.1 | doing things and very often just talking to each other, but there's also a spirit about it that is |
| 0:35.4 | very very resonant with people who care about science and technology and building things and |
| 0:41.0 | numbers and lists and words, but also who understand that these things are connected to humanity |
| 0:47.2 | and love and emotions and things like that. It's also remarkably good at finding those little |
| 0:53.3 | things that you've been thinking about and turning them into webcomic form, thus the idea that |
| 0:58.6 | there really is an XKCD out there for everything. One of the very popular features of the blog that |
| 1:05.9 | Randall runs associated with XKCD is the What If section where he started a few years ago |
| 1:12.5 | taking questions from readers about, you know, what if this crazy hypothetical scenario |
| 1:17.5 | was going on, something that he himself is very fond of doing. This is the origin and probably |
| 1:22.8 | many of the comics. And the great thing about the What If questions is that it's not just a yes or |
| 1:28.3 | no answer and you have to really think sometimes, you know, the questions being asked, the fame is |
| 1:35.0 | the iconic What If question is what if someone pitched a baseball at 99.99% the speed of light, |
| 1:41.4 | what would it do when you tried to hit it? You got you have to take that seriously, right? You know, |
| 1:46.5 | okay, what would it mean to move at that speed through the atmosphere and you have to ignore |
| 1:52.4 | the problems like you cannot throw a baseball that fast and take seriously the consequences. |
| 1:58.7 | And what Randall has subsequently done is to collect some of the best answers to the What If |
| 2:03.9 | questions into a book first called What If, serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical |
... |
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