There Is Always More Than One Way

By Shlomo Maital

    In this blog, and in general in teaching my students, I stress that one should assume every challenge has a solution.  The alternative is despair, which is never productive.

     But perhaps this, too, falls short. Perhaps we should assume that every challenge has many solutions.  We should not leap to conclusions and grasp the very first one that comes to mind…  because there are more.

       Here is a story that illustrates ‘more ways than one’.  It is from the epilog to our book.[1]

        Nils was a student of Physics at Cambridge. He was asked: Show how to determine the height of a tall building, with a barometer.   The student answered:  take the barometer to the top of the building, tie a long rope to it, lower the barometer to the ground, and measure the length of the rope. 

         The answer the examiner wanted, of course, was to measure air pressure at ground level and at the top of the building, and calculate height based on the difference.

          Nils knew it. But…he thought differently.  And he got a big “zero”. He appealed. An arbiter was called in.  The arbiter asked Nils to try again.

          Nils did.  “Drop the barometer, time its fall with a stopwatch, use S=1/2 at squared to calculate height.”   Or: “Take the barometer out on a sunny day, measure the height of the barometer, then measure the length of the building’s shadow…and use the law of proportions.”  Or:  “Swing the barometer at the end of a string at street level. And do the same at the top of the building.  From the difference of ‘g’ at  the two levels, compute the building’s height”.  Or;  “Take the barometer to the basement, to the superintendent’s flat.  Say, Sir, if you tell me the height of the building, I will give you this barometer.”  Or:  “Take the barometer to the stairs, and mark off the length of the barometer on the wall at each step.  Count the marks and it will give you the building’s height.”

      There is more than one way to solve a problem.  There is AT LEAST one way, and it is good to assume there are many.  Avoid the trap of small minds who insist there is only ONE way, the way everyone solves it. 

       And Nils?  He was Nils Bohr,  Nobel Laureate for Physics in 1922 for discovering the structure of the atom.

[1] Arie Ruttenberg, Shlomo Maital. Cracking the Creativity Code.  New edition forthcoming soon, Atlantic Publishing (India):   from the Epilog.