دانلود رمان انگلیسی “چه می شود اگر؟ پاسخ های علمی جدی به پرسش های فرضی پوچ”

THIS BOOK IS A collection of answers to hypothetical questions. These questions were submitted to me through my website, where—in addition to serving as a sort of Dear Abby for mad scientists—I draw xkcd, a stick-figure webcomic. I didn’t start out making comics. I went to school for physics, and after graduating, I worked on robotics at NASA. I eventually left NASA to draw comics full-time, but my interest in science and math didn’t fade. Eventually, it found a new outlet: answering the Internet’s weird—and sometimes worrying —questions. This book contains a selection of my favorite answers from my website, plus a bunch of new questions answered here for the first time. I’ve been using math to try to answer weird questions for as long as I can remember. When I was five years old, my mother had a conversation with me that she wrote down and saved in a photo album. When she heard I was writing this book, she found the transcript and sent it to me. Here it is, reproduced verbatim from her 25-year-old sheet of paper: Randall: Are there more soft things or hard things in our house? Julie: I don’t know. Randall: How about in the world? Julie: I don’t know. Randall: Well, each house has three or four pillows, right? Julie: Right. Randall: And each house has about 15 magnets, right? Julie: I guess. Randall: So 15 plus 3 or 4, let’s say 4, is 19, right? Julie: Right. Randall: So there are probably about 3 billion soft things, and . . . 5 billion hard things. Well, which one wins? Julie: I guess hard things.