#impossible geometry

So I was reading a great fanfic involving a T-Rex with a Hollywood career after Dinotopia's discovery in the 1990s giving a TED talk (highly recommend it, it's got some great social commentary on race in the form of bigotry against T-rexes)

Thing is...If the island were discovered, that means that the world community of physicists and mathematicians would probably become aware of this little gem, tucked away in "Journey To Chandara":

It's a goddamn Escher staircase*. And this wasn't put in by mistake, as the book actually outright says that Chandaran scholars enjoy using the stairs for long intellectual conversations, so they can be walking and talking with a friend and never run out of steps before the conversation is over.

I can just see some Chandaran scholar showing it to a visiting college physics professor, who accepted the invitation because he thought he was gonna bring modern physics knowledge to a bunch of people still stuck in Isaac Newton's time, but then sees this Safe-class SCP of a staircase and suddenly finds himself questioning everything he thought he knew about physics.

*This is what I mean:

these are done on paper, and so i forgot the exact time, probably at around the start of 2020.

DAILY MINIMAL - Impossible Figures (.02)

MC Escher

Although Escher did not have mathematical training—his understanding of mathematics was largely visual and intuitive—his art had a strong mathematical component, and several of the worlds which he drew were built around impossible objects.

Escher was also fascinated by mathematical objects like the Möbius strip, which has only one surface. His wood engraving Möbius Strip II (1963) depicts a chain of ants marching for ever around over what at any one place are the two opposite faces of the object—which are seen on inspection to be parts of the strip's single surface. In Escher's own words