He Drew What Does Not Exist — Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

01 / 02

TEE-SCI-CN-PEN-01-M-BK T-Shirt

Piece

He Drew What Does Not Exist Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

$ 2,345.00

Description

Penrose published the impossible triangle with his father Lionel in the British Journal of Psychology in 1958, seven years before the singularity theorem that would earn him the Nobel in Physics in 2020. The print is his portrait beside a staircase that never ends.

A Author

Roger Penrose

B Subject

Mathematical Physics

C Aesthetic

Photocopy · Collage

Exploration

The triangle is three bars at right angles. Cover any corner and what is left is a perfectly possible figure; the three together cannot exist in a space of three dimensions. There is no error anywhere and the whole thing is impossible.

Penrose published it with his father in a psychology journal, not a mathematics one, because the subject was perception: the eye validates in stretches and takes the total on trust.

That is the most useful figure I know for reading an institution. Every department does the right thing by its own criterion; every contract is defensible on its own; every decision, seen close up, is reasonable. And the aggregate cannot hold. Nobody lied at any corner.

Details