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What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions is a compilation of some intriguing questions and their answers. The questions are posed by the audience of Randall Munroe's webcomic blog xkcd and he tries his best to answer them using existing research, basic physics principles, and sometimes by creating simulations. Munroe is a former NASA roboticist so I would consider him a reliable source for such answers but the point of reading this book isn't as much about the accuracy of the answers, but more about the thought process that goes behind them.
I am also currently reading What Do You Care What Other People Think? It's one of the many biographies on the life of renowned physicist Richard Feynman. According to this book, one of the contributing factors to Feynman's genius was the curiosity instilled in him by his father. His father, while reading a book to him, described the height of a dinosaur. He asked the young Feynman to picture the dinosaur as tall as their house. In reality, this, and a lot of the other things his father said were inaccurate. However, the basic thought process was important. When you see a quantity it's important to put it in physical perspective and to put bounds on it. For example, if you learn that an engine produces 30,000 pounds-force of thrust, does that number mean anything to you? How much force is it? Would it make more intuitive sense if you could figure out the size of the aircraft that requires that amount of thrust? Is it an impressive number? How small can this quantity get? What are the current upper bounds on how much thrust can be generated?
Munroe encourages this kind of thinking. The book emphasizes the importance of taking a scenario and dissecting it into smaller pieces to see what happens. The author is trying to take into account as many factors as possible but again no one knows everything. In fact, a lot of physical phenomena are still under speculation. The important thing here is the critical thinking.
I highly recommend this book. You don't have to have this book to read about these absurd, and at the same time fascinating, analyses. The blog has them for free and you can read them at your leisure at
https://what-if.xkcd.com/Here's a list of my favorite questions from the book:
Is it possible to build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns?
What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light?
How much Force can Yoda output?
