architecture

Saturday, November 12, 2005

Wormholes

I was at a talk the other night listening to a nervous grad student present a paper about knots when, for whatever reason – I was thinking about Michael Heizerwham!
An idea came to me:
The eccentric son of a billionaire takes his share of the family fortune and moves to Utah. He buys loads and loads of land, tens of thousands of acres – and, with it, huge digging machines.
This includes state of the art tunnelers, taken straight from the oil industry.

[Image: Create 3D].

For the next forty years, one thousand feet below the surface of the earth, he carves every knot known to mathematics, straight through the Jurassic bedrock. They form tunnels, loops, topology; big enough to walk through.
The man makes his way down the list, one by one, carving, tunneling, blasting.
Smooth and toroidal, they are negative sculptures, a textbook in knot theory. They can be studied. Mathematics can be derived from their curves. In two hundred years they will be declared a National Park.
At night, when the man can't sleep, he walks the knots, lonely, underground, sometimes humming.
The knots reverberate.

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