¶ Closest Packing of Spheres
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Index Entry
Closest Packing of Spheres: Concave Octahedra and Concave Vector Equilibria:
“Every vector equilibrium became an octahedron and every octahedron became a vector equilibrium. Which is to say that every space became a sphere, and every sphere became a space. But it is not just a one-to-one transfer. It is a two-to-one. There is also an interesting precessional play which will spiral one way or the other because there are two tetrahedra involved. There are two kind of octahedra involved and you have two kinds of spaces. I couldn’t just say that a sphere became a space and a space becomes a sphere because there are two shapes of spaces. One was an octahedronal space and the other was a vector equilibrium space, so in this transformation some of it is going into one kind and one into the other. At any rate, we see for the first time a really complete change which would be something like our dropping a stone in the water. …”
