The King and the Stonemason
One day, long in the past and far from here, a stonemason finds himself summoned before his king.
The king leans forward on his throne, “Stonemason, I have a project for you. The wall at our northern border needs to be bigger. Ten times bigger! Enough to impress our allies and to intimidate our enemies. The kingdom’s resources are at your disposal. Tell me: what do you need for this task?”
The stonemason nodded, and then paused. After a moment’s silent debate, the stonemason risked a question (afraid that he already knew the answer), “Though when you say ‘ten times bigger’ do you mean ten times longer, ten times thicker, or ten times taller?”
The king though was good with numbers. He knew how big things could get when multiplied together. And so (feeling very clever) he smiled, “What does that matter? It’s the same amount of wall in any case.”
Only then did the stonemason truly know fear.
Most people, once they stop and think about it, will understand that making a tall wall is a lot harder than a long wall or a thick wall. Everyone has intuition about gravity. Almost everyone has stacked objects on top of one another and learned that the higher the stack the more unstable it gets. And it doesn’t take any specialized knowledge to realize that once the wall is higher than a human can reach that…
