What If? 2

Readers familiar with xkcd, Randall Munroe, What If, How-To or anyone with a passing interest in physics will be well-served by this book. The TL;DR version of this book would be questions of the sort of ‘what if..' put forward on a site, where a former NASA robotics engineer with a penchant for dry humor answers these questions with more than a tinge of sarcasm.
Questions range from the genuinely curious (can we burn a piece of paper using moonlight?), to the slightly macabre (how much sunscreen would you need for landing on the surface of the Sun?). In case you're wondering, the answers are no, and not that much.
On a tangential note, many researchers and engineers I talk to on a daily basis are disenchanted by the field, either by the difference between their expectations and reality, or because they're disillusioned by the assumption that science and maths are tough, and it's not possible to understand them in detail, unless you put in disproportionate amounts of effort.
Randall is one of the only people I've encountered (who's not a researcher) that still displays an infectious, childlike wonder for STEM, and distills advanced concepts to their essence. This book is a great read for that alone, along with the fact that it's also a good source for collecting bucketloads of trivia.