A new pyramid-like shape always lands the same side up
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
"What did appear as a challenge, though, was a physical realization of such an object. The second author built a model (now lost) from lead foil and finely-split bamboo, which appeared to tumble sequentially from one face, through two others, to its final resting position."
I have that model ... Bob Dawson and I built it together while we were at Cambridge. Probably I should contact him.
The paper is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19244
The content in HTML is here: https://arxiv.org/html/2506.19244v1
https://www.solipsys.co.uk/ZimExpt/MonostableTetrahedron.htm...
It's the middle of my working day and I'm in the middle of meetings, so I don't have time to do anything more right now.
"Save Page Now could not capture this URL because it was unreachable. If the site is online, it may be blocking access from our service."
And it's the other part of my site that people complain bitterly about:
That’s why in the one orientation it tips back before tipping sideways: the center of mass is inside the footprint of right edge of the tetrahedron but not the back edge. So it tips back, which then narrows the base enough for it to tip over to the right and settle.
Put another way, most things precisely constructed with that same exact shape (of the outer hull, which is usually what is meant by shape) would not exhibit this property.
But the article references a "pyramid-like shape"
Uniform density isn't an issue for rigid bodies.
If you make sure the center of mass is in the same place, it will behave the same way.
Look at the pictures. It has the same outer shape, that is all that is required for the geometry.
And for center of mass, you set the positions for the bars, any variations in their thickness, then size and place the flat facet, in order to achieve the same center of mass as for a filled uniform density object of the same geometry.
As the article says:
> carefully calibrated center of mass
Unless an object has internal interactions, for purposes of center of mass you can achieve the uniform-density-equivalent any way you want. It won't change the behavior.
That is true, but they are using a very heavy material for a small part and very light material for the other. So in this case the center of mass is almost on one of the faces of the polyhedron.
I've got one mostly working with quite a lot of sanding
1) Construct a polyhedra with uneven weight distribution which is stable on exactly two faces.
2) Make one of those faces much more stable than the other, so if it is on the limited stability face and disturbed, it will switch to the high stability face.
A structure like that would be useful as a tamper detector.
Why does it need to be a polyhedron?
That was where my mind went when thinking about the article.
[1] The spec in question specifically did not allow for the situation of being in one state, and not being in that one state as the two states. Which had to do about traceability.
Here's a 21 sided mono-monostatic polyhedra: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.13727v2
For some reason he did not like my suggestion that he get a #1 billard ball.
A ping pong ball would be great - the DM/GM could throw it at a player for effect without braining them!
(billiard)
Dn: after the Platonic solids, Dn generally has triangular facets and as n increases, the shape of the die tends towards a sphere made up of smaller and smaller triangular faces. A D20 is an icosahedron. I'm sure I remember a D30 and a D100.
However, in the limit, as the faces tend to zero in area, you end up with a D1. Now do you get a D infinity just before a D1, when the limit is nearly but not quite reached or just a multi faceted thing with a lot of countable faces?
Not really. You end up with a D-infinity, i.e. a sphere. A theoretical sphere thrown randomly onto a plane is going to end up with one single point, or face, touching the plane, and the point or face directly opposite that pointing up. Since in the real world we are incapable of distinguishing between infinitesimally small points, we might just declare them all to be part of the same single face, but from a mathematical perspective a collection of infinitely many points that are all equidistant from a central point in 3-dimensional space is a sphere.
If you're prepared to run over to wherever it ended up after that, sure.
I learned to juggle with ping pong balls. Their extreme lightness isn't an advantage. One of the most common problems you have when learning to juggle is that two balls will collide. When that happens with ping pong balls, they'll fly right across the room.
That's basically what the link shows. A Möbius strip is interesting in that it is a two-dimensional surface with one side. But the product is three-dimensional, and has rounded edges. By that standard, any other die is also a d1. The surface of an ordinary d6 has two sides - but all six faces that you read from are on the same one of them.
So while a sphere has only one side it basically never comes at a stable enough rest unless stopped by uneven ground (invalid throw), and if it stops because of friction it is unstable rest where the slightest nudge would make it roll again.
Therefore in a sense a sphere only works as a 1D because you know the outcome before throwing.
Edge cases are fun.
It’s debatable though whether a sphere can constitute an edge case. ;)
The linked die seems similar to this: https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/game/d1-one-sided-die which seems adjacent to a Möbius strip but kinda isn't because the loop is not made of a two sided flat strip. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_strip
Might be an Umbilic torus: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbilic_torus
The word side is unclear.
Inside, and outside.
Doesn't every die have a bunch of edges or even vertices that aren't considered faces despite having a measurable width? As long as it's realistically impossible to land on that edge, I think it shouldn't count as a face.
> though maybe that's a Möbius strip in reality.
You're close, it looks like a failed attempt at doing a möbius ring.
>useful as a tamper detector
Shockwatch is $170 for 50 items, for example, and the label $75 for 200.
Not dirt cheap, but I guess that’s because of the size of the market.
The SpotSee/ShockWatch brand does seem to be more expensive (almost $4 per device), but they have interesting variants like shock-triggered RFIDs.[0] Otherwise you can find competitor products at roughly half the price.[1]
[0] https://shop.spotsee.io/impact_indicators
[1] https://impactograph.com/product/shock-indicator-labels/
[0]: https://dys2p.com/en/2021-12-tamper-evident-protection.html
A rod would fall over with a big clatter and bounce a few times. I wonder if there's a bistable polyhedron where the transition would be smooth enough that it wouldn't bounce. The original gomboc seemed to have its CG change smoothly enough that it wouldn't bounce under normal gravity.
The excitement kind of ebbed early on with seeing the video and realizing it had a plate/weight on one face.
"A few years later, the duo answered their own question, showing that this uniform monostable tetrahedron wasn’t possible. But what if you were allowed to distribute its weight unevenly?"
But the article progressed and mentioned John Conway, I was back!
Why restrict yourself to the Moon?
Maybe exoskeletons for turtles could be more useful. Turtles with their short legs, require the bottom of their shell to be totally flat, and a gomboc has no flat surface. Vehicles that drive on slopes could benefit from that as well.
Someone should write to UNOOSA and get this fixed up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6mb%C3%B6c#Relation_to_a...
But yeah a specially designed exoskeleton could perform better, kinda like the prosthetics of Oscar Pistorious
If the inside is pressurized, its even beneficial for it to be a rounded shape, since the sharp corners are more likely to fail
> A tetrahedron is always stable when resting on the face nearest to the center of gravity (C.G.) since it can have no lower potential. The orthogonal projection of the C.G. onto this base will always lie within this base. Project the apex V to V’ onto this base as well as the edges. Then, the projection of the C.G. will lie within one of the projected triangles or on one of the projected edges. If it lies within a projected triangle, then a perpendicular from the C.G. to the corresponding face will meet within the face making it another stable face. If it lies on a projected edge, then both corresponding faces are stable faces.
This piqued my curiosity, which Google so tantalizingly drew out by indicating a paper (dissertation?) entitled "Phenomenal Three-Dimensional Objects" by Brennan Wade which flatly claims that Goldberg's proof was wrong. Unfortunately I don't have access to this paper so I can't investigate for myself. [Non working link: https://etd.auburn.edu/xmlui/handle/10415/2492 ] But Gemini summarizes that: "Goldberg's proof on the stability of tetrahedra was found to be incorrect because it didn't fully account for the position of the tetrahedron's center of gravity relative to all its faces. Specifically, a counterexample exists: A tetrahedron can be constructed that is stable on two of its faces, but not on the faces that Goldberg's criterion would predict. This means that simply identifying the faces nearest to the center of gravity is not sufficient to determine all the stable resting positions of a tetrahedron." Without seeing the actual paper, this could be a LLM hallucination so I wouldn't stand by it, but does perhaps raise some issues.
There's a 1985 paper by Robert Dawson, _Monostatic simplexes_ (The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 92, No. 8 (Oct., 1985), pp. 541-546) which opens with a more convincing proof, which it attributes to John H. Conway:
> Obviously, a simplex cannot tip about an edge unless the dihedral angle at that edge is obtuse. As the altitude, and hence the height of the barycenter, is inversely proportional to the area of the base for any given tetrahedron, a tetrahedron can only tip from a smaller face to a larger one.
Suppose some tetrahedron to be monostatic, and let A and B be the largest and second-largest faces respectively. Either the tetrahedron rolls from another face, C, onto B and thence onto A, or else it rolls from B to A and also from C to A. In either case, one of the two largest faces has two obtuse dihedral angles, and one of them is on an edge shared with the other of the two largest faces.
The projection of the remaining face, D, onto the face with two obtuse dihedral angles must be as large as the sum of the projections of the other three faces. But this makes the area of D larger than that of the face we are projecting onto, contradicting our assumption that A and B are the two largest faces
Oop, they mentioned that in the article.
An interesting one is the bicycle. The bicycle we all know (safety bicycle) is deceivingly advanced technology, with pneumatic tires, metal tube frame, chain and sprocket, etc... there is no way it could have been done much earlier. It needs precision manufacturing as well as strong and lightweight materials for such a "simple" idea to make sense.
It also works for science, for example, general relativity would have never been discovered if it wasn't for precise measurements as the problem with Newtonian gravity would have never been apparent. And precise measurement requires precise instrument, which require precise manufacturing, which require good materials, etc...
For this pyramid, not only the physical part required advanced manufacturing, but they did a computer search for the shape, and a computer is the ultimate precision manufacturing, we are working at the atom level here!
- I've ridden a bike with a bamboo frame - it worked fine, but I don't think it was very durable.
- I've seen a video of a belt- (rather than chain-) driven bike - the builder did not recommend.
You maybe get there a couple of decades sooner with a bamboo penny-farthing, but whatever you build relies on smooth roads and light-weight wheels. You don't get all of the tech and infrastructure lining up until late-nineteenth c. Europe.
The incongruity of the sides certainly makes it not a Platonic Solid, though the article doesn't actually assert that it is. It just uses some terrible phrasing that's bound to mislead. Their words with my clarification for how it could be parsed in a factually accurate way: "A tetrahedron is the simplest Platonic solid (when it's a regular tetrahedron). Mathematicians have now made one (a tetrahedron, not a Platonic solid)...".
It's a dumb phrasing, it's like saying "Tesla makes the world's fastest accelerating sports car. I bought one" and then revealing that the "one" refers to a Tesla Model 3, not the fastest accelerating sports car.
And then if it needs to be more polygonal, just reduce the vertices?