Rope Around The Earth Puzzle

The rope around the earth puzzle.

Rope around the earth puzzle.

Suppose poindexter takes a very long rope and wraps it around the equator of the earth. This string is cut and a piece 1 metre 3 ft 3 in in length is added in. In a common version of this puzzle string is wrapped around the equator of a perfectly spherical earth. Imagine you re given a rope that tightly encircles the equator of a basketball.

Rope around the earth puzzle imagine a rope that fits snugly all the way around the earth like a ring on a person s finger. From the diagram it s pretty clear it s one foot. Rope around the earth puzzle 1702. Suppose allistair then comes.

Update on the rope around the earth puzzle in the light of the recently observed gravitational waves. This gem from 1702 shows how simple intuition may fail us. The idea is to imagine the earth is a cube or just a square really and ask yourself if you added say 8 feet to the rope how far would that raise it above the square earth. The string is now rearranged so that it is at a uniform height above the equator.

Assume he has just the right length that makes this work without any slack. In the case of our string around the earth puzzle the radius is being increased by 15cm so we need to know that as a fraction of the original radius. Imagine a rope tied around the earth s equator like a ring on a person s finger. Now imagine lifting off this very long rope don t ask me how cutting it somewhere so as to stitch into it exactly one meter of extra rope.

From there it s not hard to believe that adding 3 feet to a rope around the actual earth would raise it almost 6 inches. String girdling earth is a mathematical puzzle with a counterintuitive solution. Imagine a rope that runs completely around the earth s equator flat against the ground assume the earth is a perfect sphere without any mountains or valleys.