Showing posts with label Gaussian Curvature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gaussian Curvature. Show all posts

Thursday 28 December 2023

The bug on the sphere

The curvature as determined by a bug on a sphere. Problem: a bug on a sphere wants to evaluate the curvature of his world. "The bug might make a circle like the one shown in" the following figure "and measure circumferences". https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_42.html


“He would discover that the circumference is less than 2π  times the radius [here in this figure, the radius of the circumference is "r"]. (You can see that because from the wisdom of our three-dimensional view it is obvious that what he calls the “radius” [here in the figure, "radius" is "s"] is a curve which is longer than the true radius of the circle.) Suppose that the bug on the sphere had read Euclid, and decided to predict a radius by dividing the circumference C by 2π. Then he would find that the measured radius was larger than the predicted radius. Pursuing the subject, he might define the difference to be the “excess radius,”  … and study how the excess radius effect depended on the size of the circle." (Feynman).

The curvature is: determined by:

This is also the Gauss curvature.