The study in question: [https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.13205](https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.13205)
The much friendlier Vice Motherboard article I actually read: [https://www.vice.com/en/article/3aqjkn/the-universe-is-a-giant-donut-that-we-live-inside-new-research-suggests](https://www.vice.com/en/article/3aqjkn/the-universe-is-a-giant-donut-that-we-live-inside-new-research-suggests)
The article suggests that scientists currently model the universe as a kind of infinite flat plane. First of all, I don’t even understand how our 3-D world is being understood as a plane. My main question though, is if they’re thinking of it as a plane that wraps around and touches itself, then why is a torus/donut a better model than simply a sphere?
In: Physics
As far as we can tell, space is flat. That rules out a lot of possibilities. The sphere will always wrap around itself.
Space is 3 dimensional, so it’s not even a “plane”. The “donut” here is actually a 3-dimensional version of a flat donut, which is already difficult to visualize for human.
For clarification, the donut refer to the torus, which is normally described as the surface of the donut that people know. It’s 2-dimensional because it’s a surface (we don’t care that it lies inside a 3-dimensional space).
However, the picture we normally see of it is a curved surface, because it looks obviously bent. What you need to think of is a flat torus, which means you flatten it up, without cutting it somehow. This is obviously impossible to do to an actual donut, which is why you need to visualize it as a Final Fantasy world map, which is a rectangle that teleport to the other side when you reach the end.
But since space is 3D, you need to visualize this as a box that teleport when you reach the edge.
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