To learn to think

Sir Ernest Rutherford, president of the Real British Society and Nobel Prize of Chemistry in 1908, it was telling the following anecdote:

Some time ago, I received the call of a companion. It was on the verge of putting a zero to a student for the response who had given in a problem of physics, although this one was affirming roundly that his response was absolutely guessed right. Teachers and students agreed to ask for arbitration of impartial someone and it was me who was chosen.

I read the question of the examination and he was saying: Demonstrate as it is possible to determine the height of a building with the help of a barometer. The student had answered: I take the barometer to the roof of the building and tie him a very long rope. I take down it up to the base of the building, mark and measure. The length of the rope is equal to the length of the building.

Really, the student had raised a serious problem with the resolution of the exercise, because he had answered to the correct question and completely.

On the other hand, if the maximum punctuation was granted to him, it might alter the average of his year of study, to obtain a higher note and this way to certify his high level in physics; but the response was not confirming that the student had this level.

I suggested to give to the pupil another opportunity. I granted to him six minutes so that the same question but this time was answering me with the warning that in the response it had to demonstrate his knowledge of physics.

Five minutes had happened and the student had not written anything. I asked him if it wanted to leave, but I answer myself that it had many responses to the problem. His difficulty was to choose the best of all. I apologized for interrupting him and asked him to continue.

In the minute that he had left he wrote the following response: I take the barometer and throw it to the soil from the roof of the building, calculate the time of fall with a chronometer. Later 0,5 applies to himself the formula height = for A for t^2. And this way we obtain the height of the building.

In this point I asked my companion if the student could move back. It gave him the highest note.

After leaving the office, I met again with the student and asked him to tell myself his other responses to the question. Good, he answered, there are many ways, for example, you take the barometer in a sunny day and measure the height of the barometer and the length of his shade. If we measure next the length of the shade of the Building and apply a simple proportion, we will obtain also the height of the building.

Perfect, I said to him: and otherwise?. If, he answered, this is a very basic procedure to measure a building, but also it serves. In this method, you take the barometer and you are located in the stairs of the building in the ground floor. As you raise the stairs, you are marking the height of the barometer and count the number of marks up to the roof. You multiply in the end the height of the barometer by the number of marks that you have done and you already have the height.

This is a very direct method. Of course, if what he wants is a more sophisticated procedure, it can tie the barometer to a rope and move it as if it was a pendulum. If we calculate that when the barometer is at a height of the roof the gravity is zero and if we bear in mind the measurement of the acceleration of the gravity on having lowered the barometer in circular trajectory on having happened for the perpendicular one of the building, of the difference of these values, and applying a simple trigonometrical formula, we might calculate, undoubtedly, the height of the building.

In the same system style, you tie the barometer to a rope and take down it from the roof to the street. Using it as a pendulum you can calculate the height measuring his period of pretransfer.

In end, he concluded, other many ways exist. Probably, the best is to take the barometer and to strike with the door of the house of the doorman. When cove, to say to him: " Mister Doorman, here I have a nice barometer. If you say to me the height of this building, I give it to him ".

In this moment of the conversation, I asked him if he did not know the conventional response to the problem (the difference of pressure marked by a barometer in two different places provides to us the difference of height between both places) clearly, he said that he knew her, but that during his studies, his teachers had tried to teach him to think.

The student was calling Niels Bohr, Danish physicist, Nobel Prize of physics in 1922, more known for being the first one in proposing the model of atom with protons and neutrons and the electrons that were surrounding it. He was fundamentally an innovator of the quantum theory.

To the margin of the personage, the entertaining and curious of the anecdote, the essential of this history the fact is that THEY HAD TAUGHT HIM TO THINK. Certainly, for the skeptics, this history is absolutely true

Let's learn to think, there are thousand solutions for the same problem, but the really interesting thing, the authentically brilliant thing is to choose the most practical and rapid solution, so that we could finish with the problem of root ... and to devote ourselves to solve OTHER problems.