How an SAT question became a mathematical paradox. Head to https://brilliant.org/veritasium to start your free 30-day trial, and the first 200 people get 20%...
My only intuition was this: if you take two identical coins and rotate them together (like a pair of gears), it takes one rotation each to reach the starting point. If you now rotate your head along with one of the coins, it will appear standing still, while the other one will be rotating twice as fast.
I still would have guessed the answer was 6, though. It took me awhile to figure out how extrapolate this model to a 3:1 ratio. As it turns out, it still works, and you get 4, but evidence of that was far from obvious to me.
My only intuition was this: if you take two identical coins and rotate them together (like a pair of gears), it takes one rotation each to reach the starting point. If you now rotate your head along with one of the coins, it will appear standing still, while the other one will be rotating twice as fast.
I still would have guessed the answer was 6, though. It took me awhile to figure out how extrapolate this model to a 3:1 ratio. As it turns out, it still works, and you get 4, but evidence of that was far from obvious to me.