Mathematics

Cutting A Sphere Into Two Identical Copies

Cutting A Sphere Into Two Identical Copies

You can mathematically cut a single solid ball into just five puzzle pieces and reassemble them to create two identical copies of the original, all without stretching or adding mass.

This mind-bending concept shows that our traditional intuition about volume falls apart when dealing with infinite sets of points. Because these pieces are not solid shapes but complex, scattered collections of points, they can be rearranged to occupy double the space. While this sounds like magic or infinite gold, it only works because the pieces are far too fragmented to exist in the real, physical world. It remains one of the most famous and baffling results in the entire field of geometry.

Source: Banach–Tarski paradox

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