Rope Around The Earth Puzzle

Now imagine the rope is made just one meter longer and lifted uniformly off the surface until it is once again taught.

Rope around the earth puzzle.

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. 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. 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.

From the diagram it s pretty clear it s one foot. Assume he has just the right length that makes this work without any slack. Update on the rope around the earth puzzle in the light of the recently observed gravitational waves. 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.

Suppose allistair then comes. 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. If you put 1 metre high sticks right around the equator and lay the rope on. 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.

This gem from 1702 shows how simple intuition may fail us. The rope around the earth puzzle. String girdling earth is a mathematical puzzle with a counterintuitive solution. Imagine a rope tied around the earth s equator like a ring on a person s finger.

Student answer form blackline master rope around the world you have a piece of rope that just fits around the earth. 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. Rope around the earth puzzle 1702.