What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions to make them shatter on contact?" The book was received positively by critics. Ethan Gilsdorf of the "Boston Globe" stated that "it’s fun to watch as Munroe tackles each question and examines every possible complication." According to Gilsdorf, "What If?" gives a view into "Munroe’s playful yet existentially-tinged worldview" by contrasting cataclysmic scenarios with more heady ideas, such as examining the effects of a magnitude minus-7 Richter scale earthquake. The "Huffington Post" remarked that "What makes Munroe's work so fantastic is a combination of two elements: his commitment to trying to answer even the weirdest question with solid science, and
Order of magnitude Order of magnitude An order of magnitude is an approximate measure of the number of digits that a number has in the commonly-used base-ten number system. It is equal to the logarithm (base 10) rounded to a whole number. For example, the order of magnitude of 1500 is 3, because 1500 = 1.5 × 10. Differences in order of magnitude can be measured on a base-10 logarithmic scale in “decades” (i.e., factors of ten). Examples of numbers of different magnitudes can be found at Orders of magnitude (numbers). Generally, the order of magnitude of a number is the smallest power