An Engineering Student, a Physics Student, and a
Mathematics student were each given $150 dollars
and were told to use that money to find out exactly
how tall a particular hotel was.
All three ran off, extremely keen on how to do this.
The physics student went out, purchased some
stopwatches, a number of ball bearings, a calculator,
and some friends. He had them all time the drop of
ball bearings from the roof, and he then figured out
the height from the time it took for the bearings to
accelerate from rest until they impacted with the
sidewalk.
The math student waited until the sun was going
down, then she took out her protractor, plumb line,
measuring tape, and scratch pad, measured the
length of the shadow, found the angle the buildings
roof made from the ground, and used trigonometry
to figure out the height of the building.
Of course, with all that was involved in getting this
experiment done, they were up plenty late studying
for other courses' exams. These two students
bumped into the engineering student the next day,
who looked quite refreshed. When asked what he
did to find the height of the building he replied: "Well,
I walked up to the bell hop, gave him 10 bucks, asked
him how tall the hotel was, and went inside for happy
hour!"
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