Q: What would happen if a beloved web comic created a series of ... physics explainers?
Randall Munroe began his career in physics working with robots at NASA's Langley Research Center. He is famous, however, for engineering a creation of different kind: the iconic web comic that is xkcd. Last week, Munroe won the web's wonder for approximately the thousandth time when he published comic #1110, "Click and Drag," a soaring, spanning, surprising work that encouraged users to explore a fanciful world through their computer screens.
As Rev Dan Catt pointed out, if you printed the comic at 300dpi, the resulting image would be about 46 feet wide.
But Munroe, work-wise, is no longer dedicated exclusively to xkcd. He recently launched "What If?," a collection of infographic essays that answers questions about physics. Published each Tuesday, the feature -- a blog extension of the xkcd site -- aims to analyze the kind of wonderful and fanciful hypotheticals that might arise when the nerdily inclined get together in bars: "What would happen if the Moon went away?" "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck ...?" Some of What If's recently explored questions include: "What if everyone actually had only one soul mate, a random person somewhere in the world?" and "If you went outside and lay down on your back with your mouth open, how long would you have to wait until a bird pooped in it?" and -- the most recent entry -- "If every person on Earth aimed a laser pointer at the Moon at the same time, would it change color?"