![]() They then connected this system holistically to a rotating shaft so that the motors always move on a sphere. To confine the object on the sphere with minimal interaction or exchange of momentum with the environment in the curved space, they let a set of motors drive on curved tracks as moving masses. The researchers set out to study how an object moved within a curved space. “We learned that the predicted effect, which was so counter-intuitive it was dismissed by some physicists, indeed occurred: as the robot changed its shape, it inched forward around the sphere in a way that could not be attributed to environmental interactions.” Creating a curved path “We let our shape-changing object move on the simplest curved space, a sphere, to systematically study the motion in curved space,” said Rocklin. ![]() In the paper, a team of researchers led by Zeb Rocklin, assistant professor in the School of Physics at Georgia Tech, created a robot confined to a spherical surface with unprecedented levels of isolation from its environment, so that these curvature-induced effects would predominate. The findings were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Now, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have proven the opposite-when bodies exist in curved spaces, it turns out that they can in fact move without pushing against something. ![]() ![]() Until recently, physicists believed this to be a constant, following the law of conservation momentum. When humans, animals, and machines move throughout the world, they always push against something, whether it’s the ground, air, or water. ![]()
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