Spherical Geometry Quotes

We often say that the earth is a sphere, but to be precise, the term sphere refers only to the surface. The correct mathematical term for the solid earth is a ball.

When a blind beetle crawls over the surface of a globe he doesn't notice that the track he has covered is curved. I was lucky enough to have spotted it.

Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.

Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began.

The waves from all the different parts of a sphere would cancel each other out. You need motion that's nonspherical.

The buckyball, with sixty carbon atoms, is the most symmetrical form the carbon atom can take. Carbon in its nature has a genius for assembling into buckyballs. The perfect nanotube, that is, the nanotube that the carbon atom naturally wants to make and makes most often, is exactly large enough that one buckyball can roll right down the center.

The world appears rectilinear, but is in fact curvilinear - a literal truth in physics, and a metaphorical one in metaphysics.

It would be foolish to give credit to Euclid for pangeometrical conceptions; the idea of geometry deifferent from the common-sense one never occurred to his mind. Yet, when he stated the fifth postulate, he stood at the parting of the ways. His subconscious prescience is astounding. There is nothing comperable to it in the whole history of science.

I walk alone in the darkness and wonder how a person would begin to determine the circumference of the earth. I have no idea. I’d probably just google it.

I should almost therefore put forward the proposal that the third hypothsis (angle sum of a triangle less than two right angles) holds on the surface of an imaginary sphere.