Poinsot’s Paper Spaceship #1 – UFO

Louis Poinsot has a crater on the moon named after him … and now, also my series of geometrical drawings.

I am taking the ellipsoid and sphere to the third dimension, based on the plan laid out before. Number 1 is an oblate ellipsoid, intersecting the sphere nearly in two circles. It is a classic 1950s science-fiction movie UFO.

This drawing carries several layers of meaning. But I hope it can also speak for itself, as an abstract work of art.

As always, I want to highlight the beauty of some field of physics – in this case is the motion of a free gyrosope, and Louis Poinsot‘s way of describing it.

But I also want to celebrate the geometrical construction: It is a piece of “helper math” used to bring the “actual math” and physics to life. I aim at preserving all the lines and arcs I use in the construction, even if they are distracting.

In previous drawings, I re-traced all the lines with graphite pencils or even ballpoint pen or fine liner. But this drawing has so many intersecting lines, and I do not want to cover everything with a grey grid.

So, I’ve colored the lines – with colored pencils of gradually varying color!

You can read more about the physics in this post, but now it’s time for poetry!

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What does the internet know about “Poinsot’s Paper Spaceship”?

This is a poem from snippets of edited text, one line taken from each search result. I am using Google in a private window, and I force myself to pick a line quickly from each document or web page returned. Many of the search results are long academic texts – on math, physics, engineering, or even arts or semiotics. I usually scroll to somewhere in the middle of the document to look for a “most random” line.

I am processing one search result after the other, freezing the line of the poem immediately. No going back, editing, or re-arranging allowed. Of course, my posts elsewhere dominate this search term, so I remove them and search for:
“Poinsot” “Paper” “Spaceship” -elkement

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Poinsot’s Paper Spaceship

forming an open polychromatic spiral pathway
saturated in semiotics
it is unfortunately noninvariant

resonant phases are categorized to comprehend
Yet Another Reincarnation of an Old Problem

reunite art with the experience of everyday life
for Long-Term Space Missions
it is the foundation

In the state of relative equilibrium points
physicists do not think

from the tropics to ice at high latitudes
Following the instructions step-by-step
The aforementioned tendency becomes more apparent

Let us reciprocate
you will be asked
to feel the effects of microgravity
in the separated region

the ignition phase is more delicate
Rotating a Tesseract in Perspective
of the lunar surface

the intersection of futuristic narratives and
the flexible bare electrodynamic tether system
give you an unparalleled opportunity

Tactile pictures
play at typesetting
when collisions are dominant

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