’Nerd royalty’ Ben Goldacre

’Laugh-out-loud funny’ Bill Gates

’Totally brilliant’ Tim Harford

WHAT IF you still had so many more strange questions about the universe?

And WHAT IF Randall Munroe, former NASA roboticist and xkcd creator, were prepared to move mountains, fill the solar system with soup and alter the space-time continuum to answer them?

Whether it’s how to make a lava lamp out of lava or feeding the inhabitants of New York to a T. Rex, welcome to the weird, wonderful (and sometimes terrifying) world of WHAT IF? 2

RANDALL MUNROE

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.