177 - Monostable Tetrahedron

This fascinated me today - after way more time, energy and money that you would think necessary, somebody finally made a monostable tetrahedron.

This is an object that has four sides but will only ever rest on one of them. If you try to set it on any of the other three sides it will always right itself.

The amount of work that went into making this object is somewhat mind boggling - I recommend following the link.

Objects that do this kind of thing typically have round edges and are somewhat like roly-poly toys such as this gömböc which is referred to as mono-monostatic:

This is the first time such an object has been created with only flat sides.

I think it’s great when people work hard to figure out something like this with little regard for practicality. That, to me, is a form of art.

The real world application, if any, would be to create spacecraft that always land upright but the reality is the tolerances are so narrow that it’s unlikely such a craft can be built (when this was first made to their confusion and dismay it didn’t work, but at some point while they were trying to figure out where their calculations were off somebody noticed a teensy speck of glue on one of the struts, and when that was removed it worked).