“When someone asks ‘What would happen if you tried this?’ and I think I have an idea of how to figure it out, I have to stop in the middle of the street and start Googling.” Munroe takes seemingly ordinary activities like skiing or taking a selfie and finds amusingly intricate methods for tackling them, illustrating each section with graphs, diagrams, and his signature stick figures.
Where his previous book, Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, was a guide to complex subjects using only the thousand most common words in the English language-tectonic plates, for instance, are “flat rocks we live on”- How To does just the opposite. Chris Hadfield about how to make an emergency landing and asking Serena Williams to test his theories for catching a drone by hitting tennis balls at one. But he does not come off as a jerk, and in fact consults plenty of experts from those other fields and beyond, interviewing Col. Munroe’s new book, How to: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems, is all about taking a physicist’s approach to other fields. It’s nice to have a friendly rivalry, but sometimes that rivalry is only going in one direction, and then maybe it’s not really a rivalry. “That attitude has done a little bit more harm than good. “I get along with almost everyone I meet who did physics, but I think the flaw we have is that we think we could do everyone else’s field as well if we tried,” he said.
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