You are as small as a coin and you are on the bottom of a blender, you have 60 seconds before the blades start to turn: what would you do to save you?
Imagine being shrunk to the size of a coin and find you on the bottom of a blender; You have 60 seconds of time before the blades start to turn: what would you do to save you? This weird question is not just a simple riddle, but one of the most used questions in Google’s hiring interviewsamong those designed to test the Creativity and the ability to reason under stress Of the candidates (such as: how many golf club could enter a Boeing 747? or: how much money should you ask to wash all Seattle windows?).
At first glance, it might seem like a simple puzzle, with an intuitive solution, perhaps obvious (for example, regarding the question on Seattle’s windows, there are those who put themselves to make very complicated calculations and those who answer: “50 dollars per window”), but in reality hides complex principles of biomechanics and physics.
Jump out. The most popular answer is to jump. The reasoning behind it is partially correct: If we were small as a coin, in fact, we would have a surprising muscle force compared to our weightthanks to the implications of a phenomenon known as a force-lead relationship. This principle is based on the work of Alfonso Borelli, father of biomechanics, who in the seventeenth century observed as animals of different sizes jumped to similar heights.
In a nutshell, if they reduced us to scale, our weight would decrease much faster than muscle strength, making us get a Very high force-superior ratio. In theory, we should therefore be able to jump out of the blender with a single jump, overcoming obstacles that, in natural size, would seem insurmountable. Still, this answer is not entirely right, because in practice, things are more complicated.
Real problems. To jump upwards, you need to transfer energy from the muscles to the ground. The smaller you are, however, the less time you have available to do it. If very venerated, therefore, the movement would be too quick and the momentum would run out in a fraction of a second, preventing the muscles from contracting quite quickly to give the ground the necessary force.
Furthermore, there is to take into account a physical limit called strength-warning relationship. In short: The faster a muscle contracts, the lower the strength it can generate. Consequently, despite the major relative force, the jump that we would be able to produce would be modest. Professor Maarten Bobbert of the Free University of Amsterdam, an expert in biomechanics, estimates that A human of the size of a coin could jump just five or ten centimeters: too little to overcome the walls of the blender.
The real solution. So? It would be necessary to use a spring mechanism. There are insects, such as fleas or like some types of ants, which store energy slowly and then release it in an instant, obtaining very powerful jumps. A human muscle, however, alone could never do what, for example, can make a formic trap, capable of generating powers up to 200,000 watts. A small human would succeed in a similar company only with a little help, for example that of an elastic band, with which to create a sort of catapult.
But you can easily object: “Where do I find an elastic inside a blender?” At this point, it would be sensible to underline the absurdity of the matter: “I find it more difficult to shrink a human being up to the size of a coin than to find an elastic band in a blender”, but it would mean evading the reasoning.
The truth is that the question original, as well as others, proposed by Google or by companies with the same objectives, It does not have a correct answer and serves exclusively to evaluate a way of thinking about a candidate and his ability to think out of the box.
