How to think, what to think, and thinking outside the box
Two people I would like to meet in real life are Kim Fabricius and
Ben Myers. For a long time, I believed Kim Fabricius to be a virtual
person, and supposed that his name was a comic mix of 2fabricate" and
latin soundalike. Then I discovered that he is on the University of
Swansea chaplaincy webpage… a whole lot more real than I supposed.
Ben Myers (whom I also believe to be real!) often gives Kim a guest
slot on his blog.
This weekend there is a sermon by Kim on Ben's blog,
and it in it a fabulous story which I have stolen and added below. It
reminded me of one of my undergraduate tutors, who always used to say
that he didn't want to teach people what to think as much as he wanted to teach them how to
think. "Go ahead," he used to say, " Disagree with me! Change my mind!
It would be much more fun than having you tell me what I already told
you." A secure man indeed.
Edit: Phillip in the comments below points out that the story is pretty unlikely to be about Rutherford and Bohr. It still makes a good story, though, if you take the names out…
Anyway, here's the story as Kim tells it:
One day Scot Ernest (Lord) Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics,
received a phone call. It was from a colleague who was about to fail a
student in an exam but for the fact that the student himself claimed a
perfect paper. The colleague and the student agreed to ask if
Rutherford would be the deciding examiner.
The exam question
was: “Show how it is possible to determine the height of a tall
building with the aid of a barometer.” The student had answered:
“Attach a long rope to it, lower it to the street, and then pull it up,
measuring the length of the rope. The length of the rope is the height
of the building.” And the answer works. However it wasn’t the expected answer, the conventional
answer: namely, that you use the barometer to measure the atmospheric
pressure at the bottom and the top of the building; the pressure is
less at the top, and factoring in the weight of the air, you calculate
the height of the building.
So the student was offered another
try. He was given six minutes to provide an answer that demonstrated
some knowledge of physics. After five minutes, the student’s paper was
still blank. Asked if he wished to give up, he said, “No, I’ve got
several answers, I’m just thinking of the best one.”
In the next
minute he dashed off the answer: “Take the barometer to the top of the
building and lean over the edge. Drop the barometer, timing its fall
with a stopwatch. Then, using the formula for the rate of the fall of a
body, calculate the height of the building.” The student was given
almost full credit.
As he was leaving the room, the examiners
called him back. They were curious: what were the other answers he had
to the problem? “Well,” the student said, “there are many ways to
determine the height of a tall building with the aid of a barometer.
For example, you could take the barometer out on a sunny day and
measure the length of the building’s shadow, and the height of the
barometer itself and the length of its shadow, and then by using simple
proportion, you calculate the height of the building.
“Or,” he
said, “there is a more direct method. Take the barometer and walk up
the stairs of the building. As you climb the stairs, mark off the
length of the barometer along the wall. You then count the number of
marks, and this will give you the height of the building in
barometer-units.
“Or,” he said, “you could take the barometer to
the top of the building, attach a long rope to it, lower it to just
above the street, then swing it like a pendulum. You then calculate the
height of the building by the period of the swing.
“There are
still other ways of solving the problem,” the student continued. “But
probably the best way is to take the barometer to the basement of the
building and knock on the superintendent’s door. When he answers, say,
‘My dear Mr. Superintendent, I have here an excellent barometer. If you
tell me the height of your building, I will give you the barometer as a
gift.’”
Well, the examiners were gobsmacked. When they recovered
their composure, they asked the student if he knew the standard answer
to the question. “Of course,” he replied. “But I am fed up with high
school and university teachers trying to tell me how to think.”
And
the name of the student of this perhaps apocryphal story? Niels Bohr,
the Danish physicist who won the Nobel Prize for his contributions to
quantum theory.
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author musician theologian
Maggi has kept a blog since September 2003, writing about theology and faith, the arts and literature, and a little about life and random nonsense...
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