Tides of Thoughts

Assume you have 100 kg of potatoes, which are 99% water and 1% mass. They dried for one day, and the water percentage reduced by 1%. What is the new weight? When I asked this question orally, the common answer was 99 kg. However, when I asked the same question in writing and gave 1 minute to respond, the answer was 50 kg. The gist of the paradox lies in how 1% change in water led to a reduction of 50 kg in weight. Let the new weight be X. When we say the water percentage was reduced by 1%, the new water percentage is 98%. So, what is the other 2% made of? It is 1 kg of mass.  1 kg of mass = 2% of X X = 1 kg/2% = 1 * 100/2 = 50 kg. So, why do many people fail to answer the question when asked orally? Instead of doing the above steps, we simply tend to reduce the 1% mentioned in the question from the overall weight of the potatoes and end up with 99 kg as the answer. When we were given time and resources to calculate the percentages on a piece of paper or a calculator, we tend to foc...

Chaos theory is something you might have heard about. If you haven't heard of it, it states that what seems to be randomness in chaotic complex systems is often associated with underlying patterns, interconnections, and is highly sensitive to the initial conditions. For non-science students, a chaotic complex system is any complex system that is made up of multiple factors influencing the outcome of such a system. Basically, such systems are represented as mathematical functions, and chaos theory suggests that the output of such mathematical functions (chaotic systems) depends on the sensitivity of the initial conditions. The impact of initial conditions on complex systems has been discussed for a very long time. But a verifiable proof was established by the meteorologist Edward Lorenz in the 1960s when he was working on weather predictions. This is the best example I observed so far, despite the theory being extended to many other systems in many fields, including many manufacturi...