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cimoreneAlthough I haven't made a commitment to make shitposts for February, I thought it would be a good occasion for a rather silly and obscure post
Möbius strips are cool and I've always thought so.
So I watched this video suggested to me by YouTube about the Möbius strip's three-dimensional extrusion, the Klein bottle. I hadn't heard of it before, but the Klein bottle is to the Möbius strip as the cube is to the square, and it's essentially a tube that is twisted in a Möbius strip with the result that it intersects itself.
The Mathologer introduces this thought experiment first with an image of a Möbius strip and demonstrates that if we consider the Möbius strip as a 2-dimensional plane, a 2-dimensional being living in this plane could travel through the Möbius strip and be upside-down when it reaches its starting point...
...such that when you rotate it right-side up again it is facing the opposite direction, but since it exists in only 2 dimensions, it has actually been converted into a mirror image of itself.
Then he blew my tiny mind by saying that therefore it was possible that in some place where our 3-dimensional universe is folded like a Klein bottle, a 3-dimensional being could be transformed into their own mirror image simply by traveling through it as well.
waxjism thought it was hilarious, but this really creeped me out. I paused the video twice to explain what rubbed me the wrong away about it. (This isn't a realistic fear, of course, just a concept that I find viscerally upsetting - so not like the idea of getting Lyme disease from a tick, more like the sight/knowledge of those trees with the huge tumorous growths in the bark.)
As I was groping for words to explain the concept, I accidentally surfaced Chuck Tingle's concept of the "reverse twin" - a sinister and malevolent being, perhaps from the Void???, which he characterizes as wishing to steal your skin; but really you have to be familiar with Chuck Tingle's whole... ethos and persona for context probably - and suddenly I gasped, "The reverse twin! I wonder if that's where the reverse twin came from!"
Möbius strips are cool and I've always thought so.
So I watched this video suggested to me by YouTube about the Möbius strip's three-dimensional extrusion, the Klein bottle. I hadn't heard of it before, but the Klein bottle is to the Möbius strip as the cube is to the square, and it's essentially a tube that is twisted in a Möbius strip with the result that it intersects itself.
The Mathologer introduces this thought experiment first with an image of a Möbius strip and demonstrates that if we consider the Möbius strip as a 2-dimensional plane, a 2-dimensional being living in this plane could travel through the Möbius strip and be upside-down when it reaches its starting point...
...such that when you rotate it right-side up again it is facing the opposite direction, but since it exists in only 2 dimensions, it has actually been converted into a mirror image of itself.
Then he blew my tiny mind by saying that therefore it was possible that in some place where our 3-dimensional universe is folded like a Klein bottle, a 3-dimensional being could be transformed into their own mirror image simply by traveling through it as well.
waxjism thought it was hilarious, but this really creeped me out. I paused the video twice to explain what rubbed me the wrong away about it. (This isn't a realistic fear, of course, just a concept that I find viscerally upsetting - so not like the idea of getting Lyme disease from a tick, more like the sight/knowledge of those trees with the huge tumorous growths in the bark.) As I was groping for words to explain the concept, I accidentally surfaced Chuck Tingle's concept of the "reverse twin" - a sinister and malevolent being, perhaps from the Void???, which he characterizes as wishing to steal your skin; but really you have to be familiar with Chuck Tingle's whole... ethos and persona for context probably - and suddenly I gasped, "The reverse twin! I wonder if that's where the reverse twin came from!"
