THING EXPLAINER

From the No 1 bestselling author of What If the man who created xkcd and explained the laws of science with cartoons comes a series of brilliantly simple diagrams blueprints if you want to be complicated about it that show how important things work from the nuclear bomb to the biro It s good to know what the parts of a thing are called but it s much more interesting to know what they do Richard Feynman once said that if you can t explain something to a first year student you don t really get it In Thing Explainer Randall Munroe takes a quantum leap past this he explains things using only drawings and a vocabulary of just our 1 000 or the ten hundred most common words Many of the things we use every day like our food heating radio boxes microwaves our very tall roads bridges and our computer rooms datacentres are strange to us So are the other worlds around our sun the solar system the big flat rocks we live on tectonic plates and even the stuff inside us cells Where do these things come from How do they work What do they look like if you open them up And what would happen if we heated them up cooled them down pointed them in a different direction or pressed this button In Thing Explainer Munroe gives