Physics Safety Tip
In general, avoid exposure to any temperatures, pressures, particle energies, or states of matter that physicists think are neat.
In general, avoid exposure to any temperatures, pressures, particle energies, or states of matter that physicists think are neat.
This is another one of Randall's Tips, this time a General Physics Safety Tip. This comic also serves to promote his new book as it states that this flow chart is taken from the What If? 2 book, and the shorter link to his promotion page is written in the comic: xkcd.com/whatif2. The what if? blog as well as both books gives answers to odd or strange science questions.
In general, there are very narrow ranges of temperature, pressure, and chemical makeup humans can survive in. Human physicists necessarily spend all their time in these conditions and think of them as ordinary. The physics of these ordinary conditions has already been thoroughly studied, which makes them now familiar and boring. Instead physicists get excited to study more extreme conditions, most of which would be quickly lethal to humans — anything from the event horizons of black holes to the vacuum of space, to volumes where charged particles traveling near the speed of light are forced to collide, and many, many things in between. Thus, extreme conditions are very dangerous for most organisms. Even for especially resilient organisms, such as tardigrades, there is a point past which they will stop being biology and start being physics, in which case their resilience will not save them. Thus if a physicist is excited about something, it likely exists in circumstances where your own existence — as well as other life — would meet an end. One (partial) exception is particle beams; people can stick their heads in particle beams and survive — but not unscathed. Also, physicists used to be excited about (particles produced by) cosmic rays before they had powerful accelerators.
Clicking anywhere in the comic takes the user to the link. It has been a general thing for Randall to comment on the fact that he does not know how to make only part of an image into a link, which he also did recently in the header text.