Fun Fact of the Week: In Honor of xkcd

Randall Munroe is a name that may be familiar to some Reedies, or at the very least, his webcomic xkcd, YouTube channel by the same name, or some of his books (What If?, What If? 2, how to, and Thing Explainer) He also runs a monthly column in the New York Times entitled Good Question. 

What is it exactly that this Munroe fellow writes about? The website xkcd.com describes itself as “[a] webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” Each comic is a stick figure math/physics/comp-sci/engineering/chemistry/psychology/etc. joke. And that’s about it. Endless slight chuckles for anyone who is entertained by that sort of thing. 

In a similar vein, the books What If? and What If? 2 respond to user-submitted questions which are fundamentally ridiculous in nature, but are answered in the most serious way using scientific knowledge and techniques. Munroe’s various YouTube videos (sometimes produced in collaboration with another channel, Minutephysics) are full of all sorts of fun physics-related facts that might come up in class one day, but don’t usually get their true whimsical and powerful nature revealed. 

The sun has a bit of a reputation for being hot, and thus, we might assume that a small amount of the sun would also be very hot; however, this is not necessarily the case. The square cubed law states that volume grows faster than surface area when an object is scaled. Coincidentally, volume is typically what produces heat, and surface area is what radiates it out. This ratio prioritizing volume over surface area, in combination with its  gargantuan size, this effect makes the sun so hot. However, because it is so incomprehensibly large, each little piece of the sun does not need to produce very much heat in order for it to attain its unbelievable temperatures. 

The core of the sun produces about 60 milliwatts of heat per cup of solar material, should you ever happen to come across a jug of sun juice. This turns out to be about the same amount of heat that a common lizard produces. Your hand in the same amount of space would be dramatically hotter than your sun juice, so in a very real sense, you are hotter than the sun. (You go, girl!) 

Let’s apply this creative physics to some other questions. In the video “What if NASCAR had no rules?”, the question is posed: “Ignoring the rules of car racing, what would be the fastest time to get a human being around a track 200 times?” Unfortunately, the pesky fragility of the human form sets the minimum length of the race at about 90 minutes, as the driver would die from g-force in acceleration around the curves if they went much faster. 

Typically, using science to answer questions about what would happen if something beyond feasible happened usually results in mass destruction. A baseball traveling at 90% the speed of light would lead to a nuclear detonation; all the world’s lightning striking at once in one place would deliver two times the power of Hiroshima; a magnitude 15 earthquake would release enough energy to evaporate all water on earth, and a magnitude 18 would simply destroy it. 

However, not all questions lead to doom. Some provide interesting perspectives. Again from “What Would A Magnitude 15 Earthquake Look Like?”, we learn that a magnitude -2 earthquake would be equivalent to a cat falling off a dresser. 

Reedies may have some of their more pressing concerns answered, too. For example, if you tried to print out Wikipedia, you’d need six printers spending $10,000 a day on ink cartridges. Probably not a good plan. On the other hand, you could easily go swimming in the Reed nuclear reactor and be fine, as long as you didn’t dive too deep (please don’t do this). 

Science can also be put to use investigating the legit unknowns. How much data does Google store? Google won’t let you know, so high school level dimensional analysis to the rescue! Tracking Google’s financials, electricity bills, floor plans, etc., you can track some information and make generalizations about all data centers, and the number of them. 15 exabytes of data in total. This is around 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 ones and zeros. Google’s official response to these calculations was a set of punch cards containing encrypted data, which, after trial and error, were found to have read, “no comment.”

A little fun and hopefully a little factual.