At first glance it seems easy, but there are two or three difficulties that can arise while we try to solve it. We challenge you to do it without using your hands or a dice
Timothy Peake is probably one of the most charismatic English astronauts of recent years. Or, rather, one of the few: he was the first Briton to be selected as an astronaut of the ESA, the European Space Agency. It was part of the 46th expedition to the International Space Station between November 2015 and March 2016, and 47, which ended in June of that same year.
The product of his experience in the stars is the book 'Ask an Astronaut', published this month and in which he solves for all audiences some of the most common questions they usually ask him, such as what it feels like to orbit the Earth at great speed or the million dollar issue, how it goes to the toilet in a spaceship. But it also includes some ingenious puzzle that will delight aspiring engineers ... Or hobbyists.
Peake was the first English astronaut to go to space without a private contract, and has told his experience in a book that has just been published
The one we reproduce below was published on his Facebook page on October 21, and so far, has been shared about 800 times and has had more than 1,300 interactions. It is a problem that, as he explains, he was part of the exam he had to pass to be selected as an astronaut. But do not worry, it's not about anything that any reader can not solve with their own means.
Could you be an astronaut?
Here is a mental challenge that Tim had to make in his selection process. Imagine that you are in front of a cube. This cube can roll left, right, forward (toward you) or backward. There is a point at the bottom of the cube.
Now, in your mind, roll the cube: forward, left, left, forward, to the right, backward, to the right. Where is?
You dare? Scroll below the photo to discover the answer.
The solution is that the point is in the same place where it was at the beginning. If you have guessed right, it probably seems that the riddle did not have too much difficulty. Another question is whether we have encountered problems. There may be several of us who have met. In the first place, we confuse the roll to the left with turning to the left, which is not exactly the same. On the other hand, that we thought that the statement had a trick and that, therefore, we thought too much ...
A simple way to solve the problem is to use our palm to follow the movement of the cube or even a die and use one of the points as a reference. In this way we will check that there is no cat locked up. The difficulty, however, lies in doing it in our head, which is what the exercise asked Peake and other aspiring astronauts, something that is much more complicated and reveals the special ability of the potential star traveler.
While trying to guess where the point has gone, you've floated away from the space station, doomed to spend the rest of your life in orbit
As one of Facebook's commentators, Stuart Mann, remembers, the cube "is exactly where it started, just that your perception of it has changed." That is, the physical position of the object is the same, but not our knowledge about it.
Let's stay to finish with the answer given by reader Alan Rodgers, which is much more eloquent than the one we have given: "While you try to guess where the point has gone, you have floated away from the space station, condemned to pass the rest of your life in orbit around the Earth while your corpse becomes another piece of space debris ... but you will know for all eternity that the point is at the bottom of the cube. "
