Joe’s Blog

For your consideration:

How did they do that? Or, better yet, why did they do that? That is the question that keeps going through your mind when you browse John Rausch’s Puzzle World. The site offers a huge selection of web puzzles as well as many many profiles of impossible objects, real world puzzles, and obscure international games. It can drive you crazy! Or at least tempt you to try and fit your cell phone into your water bottle. The bottle of tennis balls above was created by Harry Eng and you can see a bunch more examples of his work here. Harry was a school teacher and magician who was known to often drive his students crazy by showing them experiments that they couldn’t reproduce. You can find some other examples of Harry’s bottles here.

Harry would tell you straight away that everything went through the neck of the bottle and that all of his bottles were standard, off the grocery shelf variety. No monkey business with the bottle. The stuff inside? That’s up to you to figure out.

Beyond Harry’s bottles there also a number of other cool puzzles to check out including the pigs above (a World War II puzzle that folds to reveal a fifth pig, click the picture to see more) and the impossibly placed uncut nail in this uncut block of wood. Really quite extraordinary.

While I’ve seen the occasional mind bending object it really wasn’t until recently that I came to realize just how big a following these things have in the proverbially geekdome. In addition to these types of objects there are also hundreds of examples of impossible optical illusions like the one below. In fact, there are literally dozens and dozens of websites dedicated to this topic.

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “I, Borg”, a plan was made to destroy the entire race of Borg – malevolent cybernetic aliens whose minds were interconnected – by showing one of the Borg a picture of a highly-complex impossible object. This image would be transmitted back to the Borg hive, overloading its consciousness in larger and larger attempts to understand the image. This plan was dismissed as being genocide, so its potential results were never seen.

But in the end I like the real objects best. There is something simple and magical about these objects that defy description. It prods your mind out of stagnation forces you to think, adapt, and analyze. It certainly won’t get you any closer to knowing the meaning of life, but trying to discover the secret of these objects is still makes for an awesome mental exercise. I’ll leave you with another one of Harry’s amazing bottles while you think it all over.