This article was taken from the October 2014 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
What if you tried to hit a baseball travelling at nearly the speed of light? What if we all really had just one soul mate -- wouldn't we all die alone? Randall Munroe, creator of web comic <a style="background-color: transparent;" href="http://www.what-if.xkcd.com">xkcd</a> and former Nasa roboticist, knows the answer. "I sometimes cover science in xkcd, so people would write to me saying 'My friend and I are having an argument about how you could dodge a bullet moving at the speed of light'," says Munroe, 29. "I would get sucked into answering them for hours."
At his spin-off blog What If? -- published in book form by John Murray Press on September 4 --Munroe answers readers' absurd hypotheticals with his signature meticulous research and light-hearted doodles. "For the weirder questions, the best data you can find is from Cold War research, because the US military was interested in how materials behaved in extreme circumstances," he says. "So for what happens to a person's face when exposed to Mach 2 wind, I found grainy Xeroxed papers on the data they got putting someone on a rocket sledge in a wind tunnel."
One of his favourite questions is "What would happen if you tried to build a periodic table out of bricks made from each element?" "I had to call up a chemist to discuss the number of ways it could kill you. Some with fire, some with radiation and some would just vaporise you," he says. "I've probably done more academic research for two questions than my whole college degree."
Q: What would happen if you made a periodic table out of cube-shaped bricks, where each brick was made of the corresponding element? <strong style="background-color: transparent;">A:[/b] You could stack the top two rows without too much trouble.
The third row would burn you with fire, the fourth would kill you with toxic smoke. The fifth row would do all that stuff plus give you a dose of radiation, while the sixth would explode in a radioactive, poisonous fire. Do not build the seventh row.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
