I know it’s just the meme, but topology actually pops up in robotics. The topology of the configuration space, i.e. what values the variables you can control, like arm angles, linear positions, etc., can actually be used to determine if a certain type of movement is feasible. For example, if your robot’s configuration space has the shape of a torus, you can’t send the robot “into” the torus’s “donut hole”. Physically, this means that to get from one configuration to another, you might have to take some indirect path because the straight path (in configuration space) isn’t physically feasible.
Yeah there’s a fucking ton of applications in physics as well but then again physics has ghost particle fields and a single observation can make a wave function the size of the universe collapse to an infinitesimal point. So stop doing physics as well
All that is true and good, but I still feel like topology is one of the least practical fields. Apart from the mechatronics stuff and maybe topological insulators, it’s mostly just nerds masturbating. And I like it, too! But yeah, it’s not that practical (it doesn’t need to be either)
I know it’s just the meme, but topology actually pops up in robotics. The topology of the configuration space, i.e. what values the variables you can control, like arm angles, linear positions, etc., can actually be used to determine if a certain type of movement is feasible. For example, if your robot’s configuration space has the shape of a torus, you can’t send the robot “into” the torus’s “donut hole”. Physically, this means that to get from one configuration to another, you might have to take some indirect path because the straight path (in configuration space) isn’t physically feasible.
and extradimensional physics, for making normal shit turn out really fuckin weird
Yeah there’s a fucking ton of applications in physics as well but then again physics has ghost particle fields and a single observation can make a wave function the size of the universe collapse to an infinitesimal point. So stop doing physics as well
Very cool
All that is true and good, but I still feel like topology is one of the least practical fields. Apart from the mechatronics stuff and maybe topological insulators, it’s mostly just nerds masturbating. And I like it, too! But yeah, it’s not that practical (it doesn’t need to be either)