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
Richter magnitude scale distance of the station, formula_23. In practice, readings from all observing stations are averaged after adjustment with station-specific corrections to obtain the formula_2 value. Because of the logarithmic basis of the scale, each whole number increase in magnitude represents a tenfold increase in measured amplitude; in terms of energy, each whole number increase corresponds to an increase of about 31.6 times the amount of energy released, and each increase of 0.2 corresponds to approximately a doubling of the energy released. Events with magnitudes greater than 4.5 are strong enough to be recorded by a seismograph anywhere in the world, so