What if you wanted to visit the sun? That seems like a bad idea—unless you want to melt, or at the very least, deeply damage your retinas. But according to Randall Munroe, the brains behind the xkcd webcomic and the What If? books and blog, it all depends on the length of time that you decide to make a trip and where you go.
After leaving his engineering job at NASA in 2006, Munroe began working full time on the stick figure-based xkcd, which ranges from romantic quips to acerbic jokes about the state of scientific publishing. It has since turned into a juggernaut of popular culture, serving as a teaching tool in physics classrooms and a universal medium for science fair students to giggle over. Along with xkcd, Munroe also began a blog called What If, where he would answer questions posed by fans about things like how many calories a T. rex unleashed in New York City would need to survive, or how much force Yoda could actually output.
The blog led to the 2014 book What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, a collection of bizarre queries that Munroe doggedly researched and answered. By tying together a combination of metric conversions, expert advice, basic scientific principles, comic illustrations, and a little bit of common sense, Munroe found that he could provide a real answer to someone who maybe wanted to build a Lego brick bridge connecting London and New York, or wanted to know what would happen if you grabbed a mole (6.022 x 1023 units) of moles (the animal).
The sheer quantity of additional head-scratching questions that followed has now led him to What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, which publishes today. For Munroe, very few questions are off-limits (there are sections titled “Weird and Worrying”), and even seemingly simple conundrums lead to the most fascinating of rabbit holes. WIRED sat down for an interview with Munroe to chat about some of these rabbit holes, how to talk about science, and why tire rubber is bad for you (and the planet). This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
WIRED: How has it been, the past couple of years, writing What If? 2 with a pandemic happening—with a spotlight being shone on science in general?
It’s definitely been tricky, because it’s one of the big science communication problems that is suddenly very apparent to everyone: Oh no, we have this scientific information, and then we need a whole bunch of people to act based on it. How do we get it across to them? How do we figure out why they’re doing what they’re doing?
It’s very similar to climate change, where you have a whole bunch of scientists who figured out this thing and then a whole bunch of people who are not really on the same page with them. You have to try to get them to meet each other somehow. You can get people some of the way there. But the mismatch between where people are and where scientists are is still going to be frustrating, because they’re never going to be in quite the same place.
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You’ve been doing science communication work for a long time, in terms of explaining really complex things. Have you found any strategies to help people understand these complicated concepts?
One of the trickiest things about talking to people about something cool that you've learned how to do, or that you've learned about—whether it's science or something else—is that it’s hard to remember what it's like to not know something. It’s hard to put yourself in the shoes of the people you’re trying to talk to. It’s like a Magic Eye picture or an optical illusion: You can look at it for a while, and you don’t see it and you don’t see it—and then you see it. Then it’s really hard to not see it.
Sometimes scientists will use language that’s really tricky or specialized without realizing that not everyone knows, for example, what an oxidizer is. You want to talk in the language that people will understand. And that's true anywhere—whether it's to other scientists or people who aren't scientists. But it's hard to do that without being condescending. People really struggle with this, because they'll say, “Okay, well, I'll really dumb this down. I'll really make this like I'm talking to a child.” I think people can tell when they're being condescended to.
So the way I always try to think about it is: Don't think about it as if people aren't smart. Think about it like people are busy. They have all this stuff going on. You have a moment of their attention on this thing. Whatever else they're also paying attention to is also important. This is a person who's interested, who maybe doesn't have the background, but they’re perfectly capable of understanding whatever it is I am trying to explain. But I only have a moment of their time. What’s the really important thing to get across here?
Why did you decide to write a sequel to What If?
When people would send me questions I would feel really compelled to start researching them, whether or not I was going to write an article about it. So people would send me questions— sometimes even before I started doing *What If?—*that I didn't have a plan to write up or anything. But they asked the question, and I'm like, Huh, I've never thought about that. That's really interesting. Okay, well, I think the answer is probably this—right? And then I'm like, Wait, I'm not sure that's right. And then I can't rest until I know whether my first impulse was right or not.
The questions have, I think, gotten stranger overall, as people have realized that it maybe is possible to answer some of these. I've been just compulsively getting sucked into researching one question after another, and I'm really excited to share some of the results.
One of the things you wrote about was what happens if you’re transported to the surface of the sun for a nanosecond. The answer to that question was so surprising—because you’d probably be fine. (Reader, you’ll have to read the book to find out the rest.)
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There are a lot of questions where I realize I'm not sure about the answer, but I have a sense that there must be some reason why that's not how it works. One simple example was someone who said: “When I put new tires on my car, the treads are a quarter inch thick or whatever. Then, when I took them off, they're bald. The treads seem like they’re getting thinner—so why aren't the roads getting thicker with rubber?”
Then I'm like: Okay, well, I don't actually know the answer to that. So I started looking into whether used tires really are that much lighter. It turns out that yes, they are. And where all that rubber goes is everywhere.
Everywhere? Like, the rubber disintegrates and flies everywhere?
A lot of it gets left on the road, but it gets washed off. It also gets released as these aerosolized particles, which just drift on the wind or land in the water. You can find concentrations of tire rubber in fish tissues and in streams near roads. We’re not sure how bad any of it is—we’re still figuring that out.
There's one paper from a couple years ago that linked one of the chemicals in tire rubber to salmon die-offs in the Pacific Northwest. Maybe it's some specific chemical that we could swap out easily if we can figure out what it is and determine that it’s definitely causing this problem. Or maybe it's just that most of the rubbers have these bad consequences for water, in which case, that's a pretty big problem because no one has figured out a good way to make tires not leave rubber behind. It’s a problem that desperately needs current research, that we don't have a great solution for.
There are some people who have these wild schemes involving a thing that will capture the rubber from the tire, like a vacuum cleaner sitting behind the tire. I know, it sounds really silly, and they’re like, “We know this is silly, but it’s the least silly thing we could come up with.” This seems like a really unsolvable problem. I have an illustration of, if we put the car in a giant plastic hamster ball and then drive it around.
We would save the world from being consumed by rubber, in that case.
Yeah. Until we find out that the hamster ball is leaving a residue on the road.
Reading through What If? 2, I’m honestly just really curious about your research process. In one of the chapters, you talk about how an MRI scanner near a hospital helipad had messed up an actual helicopter. How do you find those instances?
Oh, man, I don’t remember how I stumbled on that. It was a report on a helicopter incident where the helicopter was coming in to land, and the magnetic field from the MRI scanner next to the helipad had messed with the helicopter’s navigational equipment.
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I was first just reading about how MRIs have got really big magnets in them, and thinking: I know that the magnetic field extends out away from them. It can’t extend out forever, because when I drop my keys, they don’t go flying off to the nearest MRI.
So the first question is: How far out does that magnetic field go? That I could figure out by looking at MRI manuals. I was reading through these guides, and they were like: “If you have this kind of equipment, you need to put it this far away. And if you have this kind of equipment, it needs to be this far away. Here’s a diagram showing the zones around the machine where you shouldn’t have any magnetic tape equipment. You can’t have credit cards inside this distance.” And then it would mention that this far out, you might get interference with sensitive magnetic sensors.
That was neat, just realizing that in a hospital, you might have lots of different equipment, so there’s a whole complicated process for figuring out what can go how close to an MRI … and then I would just start Googling “helicopter MRI,” “MRI helicopter report,” trying to figure out: Has this ever come up? And then was sort of surprised to find that there was an incident report.
Is there anything recently that you’ve read that has really excited you, that you wish more people knew about?
I feel like all I am is a pile of facts that I’m excited to tell people about. There was a chapter on disintegrating a block of iron. Someone was like: “What if I vaporize a block of iron in my yard? What consequences does that have?”
I know that if you vaporize iron it’ll react with the oxygen in the air and form iron oxide, which will precipitate out into little particles that float around. But I don’t know what that does. Is that good? Is that bad?
And so I ended up getting in touch with an expert in iron transport in the atmosphere, Natalie Mahowald, who worked on the IPCC Climate report. I asked: “Okay, what happens if you just inject a bunch of iron into the air?” Which turns out to be an interesting question that they’ve looked at for climate and ocean fertilization reasons. Something she said that stuck out was: “If you live downwind, and this iron vapor comes through and you breathe it, it’ll be bad for you.”
And I asked: “Is that because it’s a metal? Is it toxic? Is it bad for your lungs?”
She said something along the lines of: “It’s not that it’s a metal, it’s just that your lungs are supposed to breathe air. And there’s just not a lot of particulates you can breathe in that are good for you.”
Huh! It doesn’t really matter what it is. It’s just not air.
It’s funny how often that’s come up since then. We think of toxins, or we think about how these chemicals are bad for you, or these substances are bad for you. But ever since I saw it framed that way, I’ve realized how many different areas of life where the question of, “Are these small particles that you're breathing in bad for you?” has, again and again, the answer of, “Anything that's not air is not great for you.”
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Indoor air pollution is this gigantic problem. Particulate air pollution—we’ve made big strides on dealing with it at least in the United States and a lot of countries. But still, soot in the air is just so bad for you in so many different areas of health in such an easily quantifiable way that it’s one of the most tractable and solvable problems. We know that if we spend this money and do this thing to make it so people are breathing in fewer tiny particles, it will make their health better and make life better. Everything is so complicated, but that isn’t complicated. Breathing in fewer bits of dust is good for you.
Seems like some things are more complicated than they seem, and others are much simpler than they seem.
Yeah. It’s like, Oh, I need to know chemistry here. No, you just need to know that you should breathe air. Other stuff is not good to breathe.
For the past few years, I’ve been trained as a research scientist in biology. As a researcher, it often feels like one can be kind of pigeonholed into the types of questions you can ask. It seems really wonderful, in your job and in writing this book, that you get to explore everything!
I remember when I was finishing my undergraduate degree in physics. Like everyone who finished their undergraduate degree, I thought, Crap, what am I going to do now? I was thinking about going to grad school. And I talked to my advisers, who were very encouraging. I did have one adviser—I will not name names—who was like: “Close the door for a moment. You don’t have to go to grad school.”
One thing that they said was that once you finish a physics degree—which is very general—at this point now, you need to start really specializing. I remember one of my advisers saying that you can't just work on this problem over in this part of physics and this problem over in this part of physics and this math thing—you can’t have all the candy in the candy store.
But I found that I would get sucked into a problem, work on it, and then once I got the answer I was looking for, it would completely drop out of my mind. I really would have trouble picking one thing and drilling down into it. It’s been really exciting that answering people’s questions has sort of given me an excuse to jump around from one thing to another. That’s been a lot of fun.