Jeff Edwards Explains The "String Around The World" Puzzle

Imagine a string tied snugly around the equator of the earth. (Assume a flat, spheroid earth. Also, for the sake of making the math easier, lets round the distance around the world at the equator to 25,000 miles, or about 132,000,000 feet.) The string is tight enough that you cant slip a sheet of paper under it, but not so tight it digs into the dirt.

Now cut the string, and tie on an extra yard—three feet, or 36 inches—to that really, really long string.

Assuming the string could be suspended in space around the earths equator, Could you slip a sheet of paper under it now? How about your hand? Could, say, four people strategically positioned around the world each slip a sheet of paper under the string? Thousands? A million?

THE QUESTION: About how far away from the earth would the string be suspended?

Category:

Education

Tags:

• education
• puzzles
• school

[alpha520mec]

Why so much space taken on the board ?

[Dragonknightsimba]

Must not have caught my meaning in the last post where I said "making fun of MYSELF for sounding nerdy"

I am the person in the video, so yes it is a contradiction.

[DaNovaMagic]

Sounding nerdy comes out of, "Wow, what a loser!"?

There was no contradiction. I called YOU a dumbass, and HIM smart. In order to contradict myself, I would have to say 2 opposing things about 1 noun. Since I only said 2, and each was only attatched to 1 noun, there was no possible way for there to be a contradiction unless the 2 nouns were describing similar or identical nouns. Which they were not. The 2 were completely different; a dumbass was one, and a smart person was the other.

[Dragonknightsimba]

By calling him smart and me a dumbass you contradict yourself. I was making fun of myself for sounding nerdy.

[DaNovaMagic]

Try a winner, he is smart, you are a dumbass.

[Dragonknightsimba]

Wow, what a loser!