Revealed: The Google interview question that everyone gets wrong – so, can YOU tackle it?

Google‘s interview process is well known for testing some of the world’s brightest minds with some truly bizarre questions.

But there is one interview brain-teaser that almost everyone gets wrong.

Interviewees are asked to imagine they have been shrunk down to the size of a coin and dropped into a tall blender.

The question asks: What should you do to escape before the blender turns on in 60 seconds time?

While it might seem simple, the solution to this strange question involves unpacking some serious scientific mysteries.

To find the surprising answer, MailOnline has spoken to leading experts on human physiology, animal muscles, and grasshopper legs.

However, scientists say that one of the most popular ‘correct’ answers may not be right after all.

So, do you think you have the right answer to this classic puzzle?

Famously featured in the 2013 comedy The Internship (picture), the question asks: You have been shrunk down to the size of a coin and dropped into a tall blender. What should you do to escape before the blender turns on in 60 seconds time?

What is the ‘correct’ answer?

One solution to this puzzle that is often presented as the ‘correct’ answer may seem deceptively simple: just jump.

On face value, that seems completely absurd.

At the size of a nickel, the walls of a standard blender would be about 15 times your height – or the equivalent of leaping over an eight-story building.

However, the reasoning behind this answer traces back to an observation first made by Alfonso Borelli, often called the father of biomechanics, in the 17th century.

Borelli noticed that animals of all different sizes seemed to be able to jump around the same height.

Despite being vastly different in mass and height, dogs, cats, horses, and squirrels can all jump about 1.2 metres into the air.

This is because the energy our muscles produce scales according to our mass.

Although it seems odd, the most commonly cited correct answer is that you should just jump. If you were half the size, you would also be half the mass so you should be able to jump the same height. That means you wouldn’t need to be a pro high-jumper to simply leap out of the blender 

Professor Gregory Sutton, an expert on insect motion from the University of Lincoln, told MailOnline: ‘If you just imagine muscle as something that produces energy, the muscle produces mechanical energy that can accelerate the animal up to a certain height.

‘If that animal is half the size, it has half the energy but it also has half the mass so it actually jumps to the same height.’

If that doesn’t seem intuitive, Professor Sutton says to imagine a grasshopper jumping.

‘One grasshopper can jump about a metre high,’ says Professor Sutton.

‘Two grasshoppers holding hands – twice as much mass, twice as much muscle – can jump a metre high.

‘A million grasshoppers holding hands – a million times as much mass, a million times as much muscle – can jump a metre high.’

Animal muscles work because of fibres called sarcomeres all contracting at the same time to pull on our bones and produce movement.

The more sarcomeres pulling at the same time the greater the amount of force that is generated.

Originally noted in the 17th century, all animals with a similar body plan tend to be able to jump the same height. Dogs, horses and squirrels can all jump a little over a metre in the air because jump height doesn’t scale to body size 

If you shrunk down like in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (pictured), your strength-to-weight ratio would be extremely high

That means muscle strength is determined by the cross-sectional area of the muscle, whereas your weight is determined by your total volume.

So, if you were being shrunk down, the area of your muscles would decrease at a slower rate than your mass – so, your strength-to-weight ratio would increase.

That’s why an ant isn’t very strong in the absolute sense, meaning it can’t lift huge weights, but is very strong in the relative sense, meaning it can lift something a lot larger than itself.

Critically, that also means smaller animals can jump much higher relative to their size.

‘It is just as easy for us to move our centre of mass one metre off the ground as it is for a grasshopper to move its centre of mass one metre,’ says Professor Sutton.

So, if you were shrunk down to the size of a coin, you should simply be able to leap out of the blender – as the theory goes. 

Why doesn’t this work in practice?

Unfortunately for anyone who finds themselves trapped in a blender, or in a Google interview, there is an important catch.

Just like Marvel’s Ant-Man (pictured), you would be able to lift things many times your own mass and jump much higher than normal compared to your height when shrunk down 

In order to jump high, you need to transfer as much energy as possible from your legs into the ground, but this gets harder to do as you get smaller. 

To understand why this is, imagine a tall person and a short person jumping together on a trampoline. 

When the tall person goes to jump, they can crouch low and push all the way up to their full height before they start to leave the ground.

That gives them a long time to build up speed and fling themselves into the air, transferring lots of energy from their muscles into the ground. 

But when the short person goes to jump, even if they start from a crouch, they’ll reach their full extension much quicker than their tall friend.

This means the shorter person only has a small distance in which to build up speed before they leave the ground. 

So, if the shorter person wants to jump as high as their taller friend they need to transfer the same amount of energy over a shorter period of time – meaning their muscles need to contract faster. 

If you were shrunk down to the size of a penny, you’d only have a fraction of a second between starting the jump and your feet leaving the floor, so your muscles would need to contract really fast to transfer that energy. 

The catch is that, as you get smaller, your legs need to accelerate faster to push you off the ground at the same speed. Since muscles produce less force as they move faster, your jump height would actually drop off as you got small enough to fit in a blender (stock image) 

The problem is that the faster your muscles contract the less force they are able to produce, an effect called the force-velocity relationship.

Essentially, the faster you have to move the less efficient your muscles become. 

Think about how a weightlifter pushes something really heavy – In order to generate enough force, they have to push slowly and steadily rather than jamming the weight as fast as they can. 

So, no matter how strong you were, your legs simply wouldn’t make enough force to accelerate your body before your feet left the floor.

Because you’d be very strong compared to your weight you might jump many times your own height, or a big ‘relative’ height but compared to a full-sized human your ‘absolute’ jump height, the actual distance you travel, would be much smaller.  

Dr Maarten Bobbert, a biomechanics expert from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, told MailOnline: ‘For a miniaturized human the world looks different: you are relatively strong and can accelerate and hence move quickly.

‘Perhaps in relative terms you may jump higher than a human, but in absolute velocities and jump height you would suck.’

For smaller animals to jump higher, they have to dedicate a lot more of their mass to leg muscles.

Small animals that can jump long distances like the bush baby (pictured), overcome this disadvantage by giving over a lot more of their body to leg muscles. The bush baby’s legs make up about 40 per cent of its total weight 

For example, the galago bush baby can jump 2.25 m (7 ft), which is 12 times its body length, but has 30-40 per cent of their body mass dedicated to leg muscles.

Professor Sutton estimates that a human the size of a coin wouldn’t be able to jump much higher than five to ten centimetres in the air. 

That might be impressive relative to your height, but it’s not enough to escape the blender. 

What is the solution?

To try and get out of the blender we once again need to take inspiration from the animal world, but you’ll need to have a few tools handy. 

Professor Sutton says: ‘If I were shrunk down and put in a blender, I’d use a small rubber band to fling myself out.

‘The catapult system would work great at that size because your strength-to-mass ratio is very beneficial even if your jumping mechanisms don’t work so well.’

To understand how this would work, think about shooting a bow compared to throwing an arrow by yourself.

Instead of using their muscles to jump, insects like grasshoppers use their muscles to charge up springs built into their legs. That allows them to overcome the force-velocity trade-off that muscles face (file photo)

Professor Jim Usherwood, an expert on the mechanics of motion from the Royal Veterinary College told MailOnline: ‘If you want to make something go fast, you need to give it a lot of energy.

‘If you have really short arms, it has left your hand before you have time to give it that energy as muscle power is limited – unless you can wind up a spring.’

When you’re shooting a bow, you don’t need to move your body fast in order to accelerate the arrow to a great speed.

Instead, you can move slowly and use your strength to store a massive amount of energy in a spring and release it very quickly. 

Professor Usherwood says: ‘If I could wind up a spring over a suitable time – about 0.1 seconds – and then release it, I could ping myself out of the blender like a flea.’ 

This same principle is how insects are able to jump much faster than their muscles alone would allow.

Professor Sutton says: ‘Insects have the same problem as they get smaller, their muscles can’t move fast enough to jump high, but they have a system in their legs so they can move their muscles really slowly to store the mechanical energy in a spring.

A trap jaw ant (picture) uses spring-like tendons in its jaws to produce 200,000 watts of energy per kilogram, compared to the 100 watts of power for muscle. These ants can slam their jaws into the ground to jump into the air. Finding a similar way to shoot yourself into the air would be the best way to escape

‘It builds up over time and then the recoil of the spring shoots them up into the air.’ 

Since power is equal to energy divided by time, releasing a lot of energy very quickly means spring-loaded legs create far more power than muscles ever could.

While the muscle in the human body is limited to about 100 watts per kilogram of power, insects use springs to bypass that limit.

The springs in the legs of a froghopper can generate 65,000 watts per kilogram, while trap jaw ants jump by slamming their mandibles into the ground with a power of 200,000 watts per kilogram.

In order to actually escape the blender, you would need to try and exploit that same technique.

So, either by bending the metal blades like a spring or using an elastic band, shooting yourself like an arrow from a bow is scientifically the best way to beat Google’s blender puzzle.