The Blender Question Everyone Gets Wrong

You are shrunk to the size of a nickel and placed inside a blender. The blades will start spinning in 60 seconds.

• Duck down and miss the blades • Break the blender • Push the blades • Tip the container over by running side to side • Tie clothes to the blade tips to swing out

Google received about 3 million applications yearly but only hired 7,000 people. Interviewers created brainteasers like 'How many golf balls fit in a 747?' to screen candidates.

The blender question became widely debated in Reddit comment sections, with many people offering different solutions and interpretations.

Some proposed climbing the blender walls by gripping onto surface imperfections, similar to how geckos stick to walls.

• Weak attractive forces between neutral atoms when electrons create temporary charge imbalances • Holds graphite layers together in pencils • Too weak for miniature humans to climb effectively

• Geckos have millions of tiny branches on their feet for surface area and molding • Ants and cockroaches use tarsal claws that grip surfaces through friction, not adhesion • Glass appears smooth to humans but has tiny imperfections significant at insect scale

Even if a miniature human could climb like an insect, it would take longer than 60 seconds to escape before the blades start spinning.

The best answer is to simply jump out of the blender.

• Alfonso Borrelli, the father of biomechanics, found that smaller animals jump to about the same height as larger ones relative to their size • A horse, dog, and squirrel all jump to approximately the same absolute height • At nickel size, the blender wall is 15 times your height, like jumping an 8-story building

• Strength depends on muscle cross-sectional area, which scales with the square of height • Weight depends on volume, which scales with the cube of height • As you shrink, weight decreases faster than strength, giving you higher strength-to-weight ratio • A miniature human could potentially lift 100 times their own body weight

The extra strength relative to your weight at nickel size means you could jump right out of the blender without difficulty.

• An 84 kg person with a 27 cm jump height, when scaled to 1% of original size, would jump 42 cm • This is higher than the required 30 cm to escape a 2 cm tall body in the blender • Air resistance reduces the jump to 39 cm, still sufficient to escape

• Uncoordinated movements that flip you on your side expose 10 times the surface area, increasing air resistance to only 22 cm jump height—not enough to escape • Attempting a backflip would make you fail the escape

• Your heart couldn't generate enough pressure to pump blood at tiny size • Lungs couldn't maintain proper air pressure and passageway control • You couldn't fit 86 billion neurons in a nickel-sized brain • Cells cannot be scaled down; they are fixed-size biological units

While physics suggests jumping is possible, biological realities mean you would likely die from system failures before attempting the jump.

• Addressing ambiguity • Breaking down the problem • Being creative • Being smart • Communication

Interviewers are not looking for the correct answer, but rather how candidates approach and reason through the problem.

Laszlo Bock, Google's senior vice president of people operations, stated that brain teasers are a complete waste of time and don't predict anything. They primarily serve to make the interviewer feel smart.

• These questions engage people and encourage them to see the world from new perspectives • This thinking style has led to major scientific discoveries • Einstein used thought experiments for relativity theory • Euler's solution to the bridges of Königsberg inspired graph theory • Schrödinger imagined a cat in a box to illustrate quantum mechanics problems