What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

天才作者，前NASA员工、网络科普专栏What If合集

比尔·盖茨2015年夏季推选书单必看图书！

2014年全美畅销趣味科普书：美国亚马逊畅销书榜持续2周，入选2014年度优秀图书，上市后横扫《纽约时报》《出版人周刊》《华尔街时报》等各大图书榜，迄今稳居各大排行榜前列！ 

每年，比尔·盖茨都会精选几本自己喜爱的书组成书单和大家一起分享。今年，这位慈善家吸取了去年挑选夏季读物失败的教训，刻意避开了冗长的金融类大部头和严肃的历史叙事读物，转而投入那些轻松愉悦书籍的怀抱。书单是盖茨从茫茫书海中精选出，足以见得这次他在书单推选上的慎重和用心。盖茨表示，这些书“让我思考或发笑，在某些情况下两者兼具”。

Author：Randall Munroe

Paperback

Publisher: John Murray Publishers Ltd (September 24, 2015)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1848549563

ISBN-13: 9781848549562

Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.9 x 7.7 inches

Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces

Book Description

本书是前NASA员工、超热门科普漫画“xkcd”作家兰德尔·门罗的新作，内容来自他的“What If”科学问答专栏，辅以“xkcd”经典火柴人漫画，轻松幽默地将各学科知识跃然纸上。

如果人体内的DNA瞬间消失了会怎样？如果把海水抽干会怎样？如果地球膨胀得像太阳一样大会怎样？牛排从多高的地方掉下来正好烤熟？全人类搬离地球需要几步？这不是中规中矩的《十万个为什么》，而是脑洞大开的科学真相，小时候萌生的异想天开，都可以在这本书里找到机智幽默的科学答案！

牛排从多高的地方掉下来正好能烤熟？ 哭多了会脱水吗？

如果把一辈子亲吻所用的力气用在一个亲吻，会产生多大引力？ 

全人类搬离地球需要几步？ 

所有好奇心都值得被满足！

天才作者，前NASA员工、网络火爆科普专栏What If合集：作者曾在NASA制造机器人，后来成为科普漫画家，玩转物理、天文、生物、化学、数学各学科知识，轻松接招粉丝们提出的脑洞大开的问题，配上xkcd风格的火柴人漫画，幽默机智的答案让人拍案叫绝！ 

国内外人气爆棚，粉丝众多：国外诸多一线媒体、TED演讲人、天文学家、科普作家联手点赞。国内果壳网、译言网持续2年自发翻译连载百余篇，粉丝众多，在中国年轻读者中具有极高人气。 让科学流行起来：机智问答+幽默漫画，全书超过1/3内容发表，不怕你敢问，只怕你脑洞不够大！ 

亚马逊编辑推选： 跟很多朋友一样，小编也是通过比尔·盖茨的今夏阅读书单，关注并开始阅读这本what if? 的。书中一个个天马行空的问题，作者兰道尔·门罗机智幽默地进行了科学的解答，再配上轻松有趣的漫画，让人阅读起来脑洞大开，原本生活中稀奇古怪的问题在一番淋漓尽致的解答后都变得生动起来了，让人不禁想探究更深。 

尽管本书行文幽默风趣，但作者给出的解释都是非常科学的。这些解释都是作者本人经过充分研究之后得出的，是经得起推敲的干货，能满足广大科学“极客”的求知欲和探奇心。 

当然看罢此书，作者的初衷绝不仅仅让大家停留在探寻某一个具体科学问题上，而是提供给大家一种看似荒唐却逻辑十足的思考方式。你是不是在小时候也曾问过许多光怪陆离的问题，但被所谓的“标准答案”束缚住了思维？你是不是在生活中也曾遇到过匪夷所思的现象，但被庸碌的生活所困，懒于进行思考，所以如果你发现自己太长时间没读到什么有趣的书籍，那不妨拿起这本What If?

From the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, hilarious and informative answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask

Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe’s iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have an enormous, dedicated following, as do his deeply researched answers to his fans’ strangest questions.

The queries he receives range from merely odd to downright diabolical:

• What if I took a swim in a spent-nuclear-fuel pool?

• Could you build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns?

• What if a Richter 15 earthquake hit New York City?

• Are fire tornadoes possible?

His responses are masterpieces of clarity and wit, gleefully and accurately explaining everything from the relativistic effects of a baseball pitched at near the speed of light to the many horrible ways you could die while building a periodic table out of all the actual elements.

The book features new and never-before-answered questions, along with the most popular answers from the xkcd website. What If? is an informative feast for xkcd fans and anyone who loves to ponder the hypothetical.

About the Author

Randall Munroe is the author of the popular webcomic xkcd and the science question-and-answer blog What If. Randall was born in Easton, Pennsylvania and grew up outside Richmond, Virginia. After studying physics at Christopher Newport University, he got a job building robots at NASA Langley Research Center. In 2006, he left NASA to draw comics on the internet full-time, supporting himself through the sale of xkcd t-shirts, prints, posters, and books. He likes candlelight dinners and long walks on the beach. Very long walks. Lots of people say they like long walks on the beach, but then they get out on the beach and after just an hour or two, they say they're getting tired. Bring a tent. He lives in Massachusetts.

兰道尔·门罗（Randall Munroe），曾在NASA工作，制造机器人。2006年成为全职网络漫画家，是美国热门科普漫画网站xkcd的创立者。本书就是他的What If科普问答专栏合集。国际天文学联合会将小行星4942命名为“门罗”。如果“门罗小行星”撞上地球，很可能会导致大灭绝。

Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words

畅销书What if作者新作

比尔盖茨分享2015年读过的好看的6本书之一

并称之为“满足好奇心的精彩指南”

盖茨称：“如果你不能简单地解释某件事，那你就没有真正理解。”

Format:Paperback / softback 64 pages

Publisher:John Murray Press

Imprint:John Murray Publishers Ltd

ISBN:9781473637313

Published:5 Oct 2017

Weight:488g

Dimensions:231 x 329 x 11 (mm)

页面参数仅供参考，具体以实物为准

《Thing Explainer》以有趣的方式解释了基本的“为什么”，并告诉你这个世界方方面面的运转方式，假如Munroe的漫画让你尝试去了解这个世界你尚未触及的领域，这本书同样也是一本优秀的基本指南，尤其是给充满好奇心的你。

作者蒙罗是流行网络漫画XKCD的作者，同时也是畅销书What if的作者。盖茨将这本书称之为“满足好奇心的精彩指南”。这本书的理念很简单，但实施起来并不容易。就是仅使用1000个常用的英文单词来解释几乎一切事物，包括智能手机、核电站等。

内容简介

From the bestselling author of What If? - the man who created xkcd and explained the laws of science with cartoons - comes a series of brilliantly simple diagrams ('blueprints' if you want to be complicated about it) that show how important things work: from the nuclear bomb to the biro. 

It's good to know what the parts of a thing are called, but it's much more interesting to know what they do. Richard Feynman once said that if you can't explain something to a first-year student, you don't really get it. In Thing Explainer, Randall Munroe takes a quantum leap past this: he explains things using only drawings and a vocabulary of just our 1,000 (or the ten hundred) most common words.

Many of the things we use every day - like our food-heating radio boxes ('microwaves'), our very tall roads ('bridges'), and our computer rooms ('datacentres') - are strange to us. So are the other worlds around our sun (the solar system), the big flat rocks we live on (tectonic plates), and even the stuff inside us (cells). Where do these things come from? How do they work? What do they look like if you open them up? And what would happen if we heated them up, cooled them down, pointed them in a different direction, or pressed this button?

In Thing Explainer, Munroe gives us the answers to these questions and many, many more. Funny, interesting, and always understandable, this book is for anyone -- age 5 to 105 -- who has ever wondered how things work, and why.

作者简介

Randall Munroe is the creator of the webcomic xkcd and author of xkcd: Volume 0. Randall was born in Easton, Pennsylvania, and grew up outside Richmond, Virginia. After studying physics at Christopher Newport University, he got a job building robots at NASA Langley Research Center. In 2006 he left NASA to draw comics on the internet full time, and has since been nominated for a Hugo Award three times. The International Astronomical Union recently named an asteroid after him: asteroid 4942 Munroe is big enough to cause mass extinction if it ever hits a planet like Earth.

 兰道尔·门罗（Randall Munroe），曾在NASA工作，制造机器人。2006年成为全职网络漫画家，是美国*热门科普漫画网站xkcd的创立者。《那些古怪又让人忧心的问题》就是他的What If科普问答专栏合集。国际天文学联合会*近将小行星4942命名为“门罗”。如果“门罗小行星”撞上地球，很可能会导致大灭绝。 

媒体推荐

A brilliant concept. If you can't explain something simply, you don't really understand it. And Randall Munroe is the perfect guy to take on a project like this . . . If you know Munroe's previous work, it will come as no surprise that parts of Thing Explainer are laugh-out-loud funny . . . filled with cool basic knowledge about how the world works. If one of Munroe's drawings inspires you to go learn more about a subject - including a few extra terms - then he will have done his job. He has written a wonderful guide for curious minds (BILL GATES)

Wonderful (Neil Gaiman)

In the crowded field of trivia, nothing beats Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe, the physicist-turned-comic-artist, a sequel to What If ? . . . It is very funny and has something quite serious to say about our misplaced faith in long words (Daily Telegraph)

Thing Explainer gets to the real essence of things (New Scientist)

Like any good work of science writing, [Thing Explainer] is equal parts lucid, funny, and startling (NewYorker.com)

In just over a decade Randall Munroe has become firmly established and it's safe to say adored as the author of xkcd. Now, Munroe has produced a book - and Thing Explainer isn't just any book. It's beautiful, packed with facts, figures and richly and simply presented diagrams (Register)

Reliably amusing and often enlightening (The Times, Books of the Year)

比尔盖茨为本书所写的书评

我发现在慈善行业里，术语是一个问题，比如在健康领域工作时，你自然会听到讨论新医学研究时会蹦出来的那些词汇，诸如“serum”以及“in vitro”（或者更复杂的词语）。数年之后我已对其习以为常，但在一开始，我仍然需要不停提醒自己：serum是指没有红细胞以及白细胞的血液，In vitro 的意思是“在玻璃中”，也就是在试管里。直到今天，我仍需要在不同的领域面对这个由陌生到熟悉的过程。

而阅读Randall Munroe的新书是一个非常有趣的过程。他在书中将诸般事物一一诠释，从智能手机到美国宪法，并且在其中你不会碰上费解的术语。书中蓝图加上趣味横生的图示，仅用1000个英文常用单词就将这些事物的原理阐述清楚。比如dishwasher这样的词汇被更简单的“box that cleans food holders”解释。

这样的做法更契合了爱因斯坦的想法：如果你不能以简单的方式诠释一样事物，那你并没有真正地理解它。而Randall Munroe恰好精于此道。他曾是NASA机器人领域的专家，而现在做起了知名的XKCD网站（译者注：或许提到更广为人知的What if系列，国内的读者会有更深的印象）。Munroe让我想起了可汗学院的创始人Sal Khan，或是Crash Couse的Hank Green，他们三人都在致力于让知识传播给更多的人。

《Thing Explainer》使用了尽可能少的词汇，但配上了生动的配图以及到位的注释。比如说你想知道食物在microware oven（“一种利用微波加热食物的装置”）中如何解冻，Munroe就会这样回答你：“当你将食物放进食物加热装置中，一会儿，一部分并就会融化成水，而微波可以快速加热水分，能量足以将水分蒸发，不过在这之前食物早就加热好啦！”

但如果你了解过Munroe之前的作品，就会知道《Thing Explainer》还是一部让你笑出声的作品。比如他对于美国的土星五号运载火箭引擎部分的解释：”此处会喷出大量的火，如果你想进入太空，请将此端朝下；“如果此端朝上则会带来一些严重的后果，就不能进入太空了哦。”

还比如他对于美国宪法第18号修正案的解释：“和啤酒葡萄酒说再见。”及对美国宪法第21号修正案的解释：“别管上面那条。”

当然，这样的做法让事物更为明了，但在极个别的情况中，我更希望Munroe直接使用“Mars（火星）”而不是“red world（红色星球）”，或者直接用“Helium（氦气）”而不是“带来滑稽嗓音的气体（funny voice air）”

不过，瑕不掩瑜，Munroe自己也意识到了这之间的关系，在序言（“即：本书开始之前的部分”）中，他承认道有时使用一些术语是不可避免的。“在开始了解一样东西之前，你需要从他人那里获得帮助，但如果你想弄懂他们说的东西，就得弄懂他们所使用的词汇。同样的，你也需要懂得如何描述问题才能向他人提出问题。很多书会告诉你这个东西叫什么，这本书则用于解释为什么。”

这本书确实漂亮地解决了这个问题，《Thing Exlainer》以有趣的方式解释了基本的“为什么”，并告诉你这个世界方方面面的运转方式，假如Munroe的漫画让你尝试去了解这个世界你尚未触及的领域，这本书同样也是一本优秀的基本指南，尤其是给充满好奇心的你。