¶ Railroad Tracks (2)
← Railroad Tracks (1) | Railroad Tracks →
Index Entry
Great Circle Energy Tracks on the Surface of a Sphere:
"The charges never try to go on the concave side of this sphere. They always stay on the convex side. You run into this kind of behavior just in trying the electroplate phenomenon. You will find that you cannot plate the concave side. You automatically electroplate the convex side. The convex side goes into higher tension which means that it is actually thinner and therefore less resistant and therefore the energy tries to follow the convex surfaces. Supposing you were the kind of energy that always follows the convex kind of surfaces and yet, being energy, you always have to do it the shortest way. You want to go from sphere to sphere on the surface of the sphere so you would have to take the great circles at the points where the spheres touch one another and therefore you would take the great circles of them. Therfore those 25 great circles are very important because they are all the possible great circles that carry all the traffic between the twelve points-- they are all the possible geodesic railroads. With that kind of energy which always has to follow surfaces, these are the railroad tracks that you would have to follow. . . "
¶ Citations
- Oregon Lecture #7, pp. 266-267. 11 Jul’62
