What came first, the chicken or the egg? Yanny or Laurel? Is the dress blue and black or white and gold? These puzzling questions have fueled lively debates on the internet for decades. Now, a new debate is causing a stir online, and it has everyone stumped.
Ryan Nixon, who goes by @NewYorkNixon on Twitter, sparked a debate when he shared an idea that he and his friends devised. “My mates and I are having the STUPIDEST debate…And I am here for it,” he tweeted. “Do you think there are more doors or wheels in the world?”
Nixon attached a poll to his tweet, which was posted on Friday, 5 March. Since then, it has gained more than 1,000 replies and attracted 223,347 overall votes in just 24 hours. The poll saw wheels beat out doors, but only by about seven per cent. Regardless of the poll’s outcome, the mind-boggling question had people creating graphs and formulas to prove their answer.
The results of the Twitter poll showed wheels receiving 53.6 per cent of the final vote. With more than one billion cars on the roads, plus wheel-operated machinery, many people believed there to be more wheels than doors in the world.
“Who is voting doors???” responded one person. “There’s wheels on everything. I have wheels on my garment rack, makeup storage holder, rubbish bin. It’s definitely wheels.”
Another said: “Very solidly wheels. All cars have 4 wheels but 2-4 doors. An average home might have 6-10 doors but it also has 3 suitcases with 6-12 wheels. A collection of toy cars might have 400 wheels.”
This Twitter user counted suitcases as having wheels as well. “How many suitcases with wheels on have you got in your house?” they asked. “I’ve got eight. That’s 32 wheels just there.”
And one person created an alignment chart to break down the existential concept of wheels. “I spent far too long on this please like and subscribe,” they said.