Discuss Get Out! here

[Beartalon]

The solution is posted via the puzzle link in the first post of this thread

[Chamera]

What about wrapping the marbles in your clothing, increasing their size without leaking 'too' much, or loosing them down the drain.

[Beartalon]

Regardless of how you accomplished it, increasing the size of the marbles worked.

[HappyFunBall]

It's really sad that whoever wrote this puzzle relied on a solution requiring some knowledge of physics, yet clearly was clueless about the physics himself. See previous posts by ZutAlors and myself for more detail.

[Sofis]

HappyFunBall, your objection assumes that the marbles are made of glass. The material of the marbles is not stated in the puzzle.

[ZutAlors!]

Well, realistically, Sofis, the coefficient of thermal expansion for different materials doesn't range widely. Here's a table, f'rinstance. Glass and ceramics, the first materials I think of when thinking "marbles", lie on the lower end, in the 5E-6/F range. Steel is roughly only double that, and the most expansive materials are only around 20E-6/F. That would still only give an expansion of about 0.001 inches (25 microns) or so, well below what I would think a normal manufacturing tolerance for ceramic urinal holes. Seems like the expansion would be possible if there were only one hole, but seems highly unlikely, still, that all holes (and marbles!) are so similar.

[Vagrant]

How exactly do we get enough hot water on the door to make it expand to a tight fit?

[Beartalon]

The puzzle said the marbles just fit through those holes. Whether or not they expanded, if they were held in place by the cloth, even if it is porous, would they not have blocked the water?

[Usurper]

What people don't seem to realise is that If Sofis can change the material of which marbels are made, willy-nilly, he can no doubt change the laws of physics pretty easily, thus the whole stupid idea of letting the marbles expand whilst in a porous shirt, is in fact not stupid at all and based on sound scientific reasoning. All we need to do is use the new Sophysics, or is it spelt Sofisics?

[Sofis]

Originally posted by ZutAlors!:

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Well, realistically, Sofis, the coefficient of thermal expansion for different materials doesn't range widely.

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But then, presumably, no material would do. I know this to not be true. The inspiration for this puzzle was a school physics lab from some time ago, which involved seeing a metal ball fit through a hole, heating it, and seeing it no longer fit through. While the heating involved a bunsen burner, by the time the ball had cooled down sufficiently to fit through the hole again, if I recall correctly, it was possible to touch it without getting burned. While this would indeed require some pretty specific manufacturing, this sometimes happens in puzzles.
(Oh, and if the urinal being ceramic is a problem (since you keep mentioning it - FWIW, the urinal in my head was metal), I would assume that the drain hole itself had some sort of metal girding it. At least, I've never seen a drain that was simply a hole bored into ceramic.)

Originally posted by Vagrant:

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How exactly do we get enough hot water on the door to make it expand to a tight fit?

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Simply starting to flood the room would get water onto the door.

[What if...]

I just thought I'd point out that in the coin puzzle, the "manufacturing" is all stated in the problem, but the solution does not depend on such unusual circumstances.