Mobius Universe



The other day I read a great article someone posted on a UFO discussion group I belong to on Facebook.  For those who are new to the ISOT blog I will put out the clarifier that any "UFO discussion group" that I actively participate in is not going to be talking about Bigfoots and El Chupacabra.  This is a science-based group of academics and philosophers rooted in reality, the same way I try to model this blog.



Möbius Strip

One of the admins of the group posted a blog article by Joe Murgia who goes by the pseudonym UFO Joe.  I do not  know Joe personally but after seeing the article I noticed that I follow him on Twitter so I have probably read his blog before.  Like me, he seems to also be concerned with getting at the truth of matters and avoiding conspiracy theories or degenerating into the Supernatural.

Joe posted an article, based on stories from George Knapp and others, which was mostly about an event that occurred at the Skinwalker Ranch.  This is a property owned by aerospace contractor Bob Bigelow, a man who has had quite a bit of involvement in UFOlogy.  Supposedly a lot of weird stuff goes down at the Skinwalker Ranch.  It is said to be a hotbed of UFO activity and other inexplicable phenomena.  I do not buy in to all of that but then, I have not been there.  Maybe if Bob would be so kind as to fly me out there on his private jet I could write a favorable article about the place *ahem*.

The UFO Joe story involves a visit to the ranch by a US government official who was studying UFO reports.  While there, this official witnesses a UFO sighting, of sorts.  What he saw was not a spaceship, it was some type of projection of an object known to mathematicians as a Möbius Strip (also known as Möbius loop or Möbius band, any of which would be great names for a rock band).

At this point, I had to stop reading that article - not because I did not like it, I eventually did finish it - and immediately start doing some research.  Someone from the government saw something strange floating in the air - yeah great.  Back up, a sec.  What is this Möbius Strip of which you speak?  It is not every day that I hear about something I have never heard of before.  Once upon a time, I was great at math.  But I had no recollection of ever hearing of this Möbius Strip.  I had to find out more.

What is a Möbius Strip?


I have been to the Las Vegas Strip many times.  I love Vegas.  I could sit at that Roulette wheel for hours.  This is a different kind of strip, though.  Think more a strip of paper.  A Möbius Strip is a one-sided three dimensional object.  It has no beginning and no end.  It has special properties not found in other three dimensional objects.  They are easy to create.  I made some with my son and then I wrote an article on How to make a Mobius Strip.

One special property of a Möbius Strip is you can traverse its entire length and end up back where you started, without crossing from one side to the other.  Here, watch this video:


We did a couple other experiments too to see another cool property of the Möbius Strip.  You can cut it in half and instead of making two Möbius Strips, each with a half twist, it makes one long Möbius Strip with a loop.  You see, the two half twists combine to make a full twist.  Watch this:


Mind blown.  Cutting it in half again, you would think,

Twist + Twist = Loop

Therefore,

Loop + Loop = Loopty Loop

But no, you would be wrong.  Cutting it in half the second time makes a mess of spaghetti where somehow the strip goes through both loops.  It is crazy.  Check this out:


But so what!  What does all this have to do with a blog about aliens and UFOs?  Pay attention, here's the thick of the plot.  All of this geometry got me thinking about aliens.  Also, eating, sitting, and breathing get me thinking about aliens.  What if the Universe was in the shape of a Möbius Strip?  Ha?  Follow me on this.

The Möbiverse


When we look out into space we see stars really really far away.  Some of those stars have planets with intelligent life circling them.  But they are so far from us we could never get there.  Rocket technology could progress by orders of magnitude for another hundred years and we could still never carry enough food and fuel to get to another star system before the rocket's passengers all died from old age or cabin fever.

But what if, when we look way out into space, we are actually looking at something which has curved back in on itself à la the Möbius Strip?  Then, a planet which appears to be many light-years away could actually be on the back side of our visual plane, so to speak.  If that were the case, instead of travelling in a straight line to get there, we could just punch a hole in space and get there instantaneously.

Picture the old wormhole trick, where you fold two sides of a piece of paper together and then punch a hole through them with a pencil.  Except in this case, instead of folding the paper, you just go straight through.

Wormhole Trick
The Ole Wormhole Trick
Get's 'em every time
I call it the Punch Tunnel Theory.  I was going to call it the Marceau Tunnel Theory?  But there is already The Marceau Ship and The Marceau Contest, and I named the island in my pond Marceau Island, and we have a hill behind the house the kids and I call Marceau Hill so - I do not want people to start thinking I am some kind of an egomaniac.  😁

Here is a demonstration of this so-called Punch Tunnel Theory:


But wait, you say, I am a fan of the Multiverse theory and this new Punch Tunnel theory contradicts that.  Maybe not.  If you think we live in a series of universes or dimensions where you can travel from one to the other through some sort of barrier, maybe what you think of as a Multiverse is actually a Möbiverse.  In the Möbiverse, you can travel from place to place by punching a hole between barriers, just like in the Multiverse, but in the Möbiverse these places are not truly separated from each other - you could easily pass directly from one to the other by travelling in a straight line, if you had a rocket fast enough.  The straight line just happens to loop around itself endlessly, like as if you were to cut a Möbius Strip in half an infinite number of times.

Möbiverse
The Möbiverse
Maybe that makes it the Spaghettiverse?  In that case, you could also travel from one part of the Universe to another, not by punching through walls but by simply jumping off one strand of spaghetti, onto another.  You could still take the straight line route, but in this case, the shortest distance between two points would not actually be a straight line, it would be a hop.  The Hop Theory?  I love naming things.

What do you think?  I welcome all comments.


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Thank you for reading and keep an eye on the sky.

Comments

  1. Hello David, I see I'm the only one to comment so far after this ISOT post. I actually found you by doing a search, because I've also been playing around with a similar concept. I've been coming at it from the perspective of how the universe began. As you mentioned the multiverse concept, I too think this seems most likely and it fits with present day science. This is not completely new, as I've heard something like this before, but it's never been communicated very well. I was watching Roger Penrose talk about his impossible triangle, and his father Lionel Penrose's endless staircase. I realized that 2 of my favorite Escher drawings Waterfall (circa 1961), and Ascending and Descending (circa 1951) were inspired by Lionel and Roger Penrose. It also got me thinking about the multiverse and that it maybe as you suggest. Black holes, maybe the beginnings of other universes that just loop back on each other in a never ending stream of universes. A kind of mobius swiss cheese multiverse, the holes being the black wholes and the cheese being space/time analogy. What I like about this idea, is it doesnt require new stuff, just the infinite recycling of matter/energy. It explains how something appears to have come from nothing. I'm basically a pantheist, so God to me is the Multiverse, similar to what Spinoza described. Anyway, it's just a thought.

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  2. Thanks for your well-thought-out and positive response to this article. I never thought of it before but some of Escher's work is definitely emblematic of this concept.

    I like your thoughts on black holes. I have this subject on my writing To-Do List - it is what led me to start really exploring quantum mechanics, recently.

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  3. thanks david. I enjoyed your article and only came across because i was thinking this morning that the "big bang" was somewhere along a mobius strip, if you believe that the universe is infinite. I thought that "our" universe that we exist in went one direction and another equal universe went in the opposite direction.

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    Replies
    1. Interesting concept, two universes going in opposite directions. But which direction? And are we at the center of it all?

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