Möbius madness
If you are not a mathematician, you are unlikely to know of a gentleman named August Ferdinand Möbius, who was a professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at the University of Leipzig. Despite being outlandishly talented, the good professor didn’t exactly blaze through academic ranks because he was unable to attract paying students to take his class and would advertise his lectures as ‘free’ to get adequate enrollment. However, the absentminded professor considered mathematics to be poetic, and ended up defining and lending his name to one of the most enigmatic two-dimensional structures: the Möbius band (or, Möbius strip).
Yes, all of us have seen a Möbius band: the recycling sign on plastic or the infinity sign are great examples of Möbius band. To make a Möbius strip of your own, find yourself a rectangular strip of paper and glue both ends of the strip together after half-twisting the paper (by 180 degrees). Many things are extremely remarkable about this structure. Most uniquely, this two-dimensional structure has one surface. Don’t believe? Find yourself a ink pen and mark your initials anywhere on the surface. Now, with your finger tip, travel away from your initials along the central line of the strip surface. Keep going without lifting your finger from the paper. When you will have traveled the whole strip twice, you will find your fingers back on your initials –– convinced, that’s only one surface?
This 'one surface' property leads to another unintuitive – almost tantalizing – nature of this unique structure where the laterally inverted (mirror image) form of any physical point exists on the same surface! In a regular piece of paper, your initials and its mirror image (bleed-through the paper) would be on two different surfaces; To travel between them, you will have to switch surfaces. But in your personal paper Möbius strip, it is now possible to start from your initials, and without altering surfaces, reach their bleed-through mirror image, which is apparently on the other side of the surface from your initials! Also, one could keep walking on the only surface of the strip forever without ever needing to turn around – if you didn’t already, now you know why the infinity sign looks as it does!
Finally, the most unintuitive signature of Mobius structures is that they are unorientable. What’s that, right? Points on orientable things, like a ball or a bat, can be ‘inward’ and ‘outward’ or ‘upward’ and ‘downward’. No matter how you rotate the ball, an ‘outward’ point will always remain outward. But on a Möbius band, a point can slide from an ‘outward’ to an ‘inward’ orientation by rotating the strip. Simply put, the Möbius band has no ‘sidedness’. Here, every point and its mirror-image have collapsed on the same surface. It is as if, all dichotomies have disappeared and dimensions have warped-up somewhere!
Do Möbius bands exist in nature? Yes, they do. Despite the illusory visual of being so, the famous namesake arch in Alabama hills, CA is geometrically not a Möbius band. But, non-fictitious Möbius bands exist in nature elsewhere. Crystals of certain chemical compounds (e.g., niobium and selenium, NbSe3) display Möbius structures. In quantum physics, waveforms for fermions (not bosons) curiously reminds one of the Möbius pattern. Now, imagine how nice would it be if we had Möbius roller coasters or freeways in our perceivable world? We could then hop on them to simultaneously be ourselves and our mirror image – our alter ago – thereby drawing a closure to all our dichotomies. Wouldn’t it be nice if that happened?
Let me close with a crazy thought. What if, Möbius bands come into existence somewhere in those ten dimensions (M-theory) around us somewhen during magical times of the day, but due to limitations of our perceptual faculties, we are unable to acknowledge their presence?
Möbius madness
If you are not a mathematician, you are unlikely to know of a gentleman named August Ferdinand Möbius, who was a professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at the University of Leipzig. Despite being outlandishly talented, the good professor didn’t exactly blaze through academic ranks because he was unable to attract paying students to take his class and would advertise his lectures as ‘free’ to get adequate enrollment. However, the absentminded professor considered mathematics to be poetic, and ended up defining and lending his name to one of the most enigmatic two-dimensional structures: the Möbius band (or, Möbius strip).
Yes, all of us have seen a Möbius band: the recycling sign on plastic or the infinity sign are great examples of Möbius band. To make a Möbius strip of your own, find yourself a rectangular strip of paper and glue both ends of the strip together after half-twisting the paper (by 180 degrees). Many things are extremely remarkable about this structure. Most uniquely, this two-dimensional structure has one surface. Don’t believe? Find yourself a ink pen and mark your initials anywhere on the surface. Now, with your finger tip, travel away from your initials along the central line of the strip surface. Keep going without lifting your finger from the paper. When you will have traveled the whole strip twice, you will find your fingers back on your initials –– convinced, that’s only one surface?
This 'one surface' property leads to another unintuitive – almost tantalizing – nature of this unique structure where the laterally inverted (mirror image) form of any physical point exists on the same surface! In a regular piece of paper, your initials and its mirror image (bleed-through the paper) would be on two different surfaces; To travel between them, you will have to switch surfaces. But in your personal paper Möbius strip, it is now possible to start from your initials, and without altering surfaces, reach their bleed-through mirror image, which is apparently on the other side of the surface from your initials! Also, one could keep walking on the only surface of the strip forever without ever needing to turn around – if you didn’t already, now you know why the infinity sign looks as it does!
Finally, the most unintuitive signature of Mobius structures is that they are unorientable. What’s that, right? Points on orientable things, like a ball or a bat, can be ‘inward’ and ‘outward’ or ‘upward’ and ‘downward’. No matter how you rotate the ball, an ‘outward’ point will always remain outward. But on a Möbius band, a point can slide from an ‘outward’ to an ‘inward’ orientation by rotating the strip. Simply put, the Möbius band has no ‘sidedness’. Here, every point and its mirror-image have collapsed on the same surface. It is as if, all dichotomies have disappeared and dimensions have warped-up somewhere!
Do Möbius bands exist in nature? Yes, they do. Despite the illusory visual of being so, the famous namesake arch in Alabama hills, CA is geometrically not a Möbius band. But, non-fictitious Möbius bands exist in nature elsewhere. Crystals of certain chemical compounds (e.g., niobium and selenium, NbSe3) display Möbius structures. In quantum physics, waveforms for fermions (not bosons) curiously reminds one of the Möbius pattern. Now, imagine how nice would it be if we had Möbius roller coasters or freeways in our perceivable world? We could then hop on them to simultaneously be ourselves and our mirror image – our alter ago – thereby drawing a closure to all our dichotomies. Wouldn’t it be nice if that happened?
Let me close with a crazy thought. What if, Möbius bands come into existence somewhere in those ten dimensions (M-theory) around us somewhen during magical times of the day, but due to limitations of our perceptual faculties, we are unable to acknowledge their presence?