244 Quotes by Randall Munroe

Physics doesn’t care if your question is weird. It just gives you the answer, without judging.

As far as I know, this steak question originally came up in a lengthy 4chan thread, which quickly disintegrated into poorly informed physics tirades intermixed with homophobic slurs. There was no clear conclusion.

Do not try any of this at home. The author of this book is an Internet cartoonist, not a health or safety expert. He likes it when things catch fire or explode, which means he does not have your best interests in mind. The publisher and the author disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects resulting, directly or indirectly, from information contained in this book.

If ‘other people have experiences incorrectly’ is annoying to you, think how unbearable it must be to have a condescending stranger tell you they hate the way you’re experiencing your life at just the moment you’ve found something you want to remember.

GPS timing is incredibly precise; of all the problems in engineering, it’s one of the only ones in which engineers have been forced to include both special and general relativity in their calculations.

Here’s a question to give you a sense of scale. Which of the following would be brighter, in terms of the amount of energy delivered to your retina: A supernova, seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth, or the detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball?

The Pauli exclusion principle keeps electrons from getting too close to each other. This effect is one of the main reasons that your laptop doesn’t fall through your lap.

Given humanity’s current knowledge and capabilities, is it possible to build a new star?

We keep trying to make our units of measurement make sense. But the truth is that the world is an absurd place; why not embrace it? It’s true, unit conversion errors have caused us to lose space probes once in a while. But isn’t that a small price to pay for silliness?