Potato Paradox
Question
- You have 100kg of potatoes
- Each potato is 99% water, by weight
- You run each potato through a dehydrator, reducing each potato's water content to 98%
- How much do your potatoes weigh now?
Answer
- Let's assume that each potato weighs 100g
- You have 1000 potatoes, each weighing 100g
- Each potato is 99g water, 1g other stuff -- {$99:1$}
- In order to make each potato 98% water, we need the ratio to be {$98:2$}
- {$98:2 = 49:1$}
- Because we can't add any more non-water stuff, we need to reduce the water content by {$\frac{49}{99}$}
- Thus the total weight of the potatoes will be 50kg after dehydration