Friday 3 June 2016

More Platonic Solids? Change The Space-Time Continuum!

Let's go spelunking into the hole of words. It's dark down there, filled with unknown topics and ideas. Thankfully, politics is off the agenda, unless it's on something as silly as Team Ginger versus Team Mary Ann! (For the record, it's Ginger all the way, after a brief sojourn on the other side.) (See: 'Gilligan's Island')

Where shall we go this time? I had ideas this morning, before the ordeals of the day kicked in, including the preparations for the latest origami dodecahedron. Each one of those elaborate constructions requires twelve modules built from A4 coloured paper, set up in mated pairs. It normally takes an hour or two to prepare the modules for each student.

We could talk about the Platonic Solids, actually, those five regular and convex (which means they have flat faces instead of spikes) solids. There are only five regular such polyhedra, if you can imagine that. They are the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron. There can be no more. Out of all the possible three-dimensional solids there are only five which can have identical faces, and where each face has equal lengths and angles. Five.

Are there any more such solids out there in the universe? Are any more possible? What if we changed the laws of the universe? Yes... if we changed the space-time continuum then more might be possible, but then we could also do all kinds of other things...

O.

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