內容簡介
內容簡介 【比爾蓋茲推薦書單：歷年推薦】你有沒有試過要多了解一些不可思議的事情，但是面對難以理解的專業術語卻又感到沮喪？認識所有文字，但拼湊起來卻如外星人語言，Randall Munroe是紐約暢銷書冠軍What If?的作者，也是同名部落格格主，XKCD網路漫畫的創始人，解答了成千上萬的科學問題，極受歡迎。在Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words一書中，將那些古怪又難懂卻又想了解的問題，用幾筆線條，跟淺顯易懂的詞彙，解釋了這些長期存在卻不知其所以的事物，包括：微波就是一種食物加熱單選按鈕的概念；橋樑則是高大道路的概念；數據中心是計算機建築的概念；國際太空站則是共享空間的房子；太陽系是太陽周圍的其他世界；板塊則是我們生活在大平石頭上的概念；洗衣機和烘乾機就是讓衣服氣味好；飛機則是打開的翅膀；細胞則是你袋子裡的東西。就這麼簡單幾個字，解釋了板塊、太陽系和細胞，原來這麼有趣就能化繁為簡，提供這些問題的答案，滑稽的，有趣的，易理解的，這本書是為任何年齡撰寫的，以後再也不用擔心回答不了小朋友的為什麼，或回答了他們還是不懂，這本書不僅提供答案，也讓你學習如何簡單回答複雜問題的技巧。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 us the answers to these questions and many, many more. Funny, interesting, and always understandable, this book is for anyone -- age 5 to 105 -- who has ever wondered how things work, and why."
