Welcome to our latest blog post! Before diving into the blog, imagine a world without any distinction between outside and inside. The paper you hold has two sides (front and back), but could you imagine something with only one side?
Yes, there are things with one side, no inside or outside defined. To learn about these unbelievable things, continue through the post.
Möbius strip
If you take a rectangular strip, the strip would have two sides and four edges. Now try joining the short edges of the rectangular strip to each other, but wait; give a twist to the strip before you join it.
Image credits: chalkdustmagazine.com
Now you have a strip with one side and one edge. Unbelievable? You can check it out for yourself. Take a pen and start drawing a line without lifting your hand. You would find yourself at the point where you started. There was no beginning or end of any surface; it was just a single-sided surface.
The properties of the strip were discovered independently and almost simultaneously by two German mathematicians, August Ferdinand Möbius and Johann Benedict Listing, in 1858
Fact: The Möbius strip is a non-orientable surface. That is, if you start walking from a point on the strip and then when you reach back to the spot, you would be the mirror image of yourself!
Now that you have seen a one-sided strip let us look into something that has no inside and outside and no volume.
The above image depicts the Klein Bottle; in reality, it is a bottle that exists in 4D. But since our universe is 3D, the above is a 3D picture of a 4D bottle.
It works similarly to the Mobius strip. And it has no separate boundaries that would separate inside and outside. It is said to have zero volume. If you are wondering why it has a zero volume, it is because it is similar to a line or a surface that would have no volume.
The Klein bottle was first described in 1882 by the German mathematician Felix Klein.
According to some interpretations, the 4th dimension of the Klein bottle is said to be time. And the intersection of the bottle, as seen in the image above, through itself would not be present in a 4D; there would be nothing to pierce itself in the 4D. Hence, this is not an actual Klein bottle. It is just a representation of it.
Fact: If you find a huge Klein bottle and start walking through it, you will be standing upside down by the time you reach the point where you started! That would be because it is a 3D image of a 4D non-orientable surface!
Do you want to see the Klein bottle? Do you want to experience how something entering the Klein bottle would trace its path? Then why do you want to wait? Visit our center in Bangalore and look at the in-house Klein bottle and trace out the track.
Stay tuned for more science facts and blogs!
Reference:
- https://plus.maths.org/content/introducing-klein-bottle
- https://www.kleinbottle.com/whats_a_klein_bottle.htm
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein_bottle#:~:text=In%20mathematics%2C%20the%20Klein%20bottle,flipping%20the%20traveler%20upside%20down.
- https://www.britannica.com/science/Mobius-strip
- https://www.meteorologiaenred.com/en/botella-de-klein.html