If you read the column, you know the drill: strangers on the Internet ask Munroe weird, extreme hypothetical questions, like what would happen if you could throw a baseball at the speed of light, or what it would take to make an astronomically plausible asteroid of the size and density of the one that The Little Prince lives on. Then Munroe — a former NASA roboticist who trained as a physicist — answers these questions with a kind of fiendish comprehensiveness, describing the bizarre physics of very small, very large, very fast, very slow, very empty and very dense things in meticulous detail that does nothing to mask his near-satanic glee in the perversity of the universe at its extremes.
There’s no learning like the learning you do when you’re laughing. And if the laughter isinspired laughter, laughter at the vastness and strangeness and sheer delight of the universe, then the learning sticks, because it is bonded to an intense emotion. Reading Munroe doing science is that kind of intense experience, that kind of learning. Every one of these short, lucid, illustrated science articles is a lesson about physics that’s not only memorable, it’s a pleasurable memory, tinged with tingly, delicious terror-at-a-distance for the howling, eschatological dementedness of physics.
via Boing Boing
