Of course, were already inside the universe. And this is just what we imagine part of its shape to be. And mathematicians are imagining and discovering the shape of everything from the cosmos to the microcosmos, including the smallest strands of dna. So welcome to the world of. Topology. We can begin to understand this most amazing branch of mathematics with a simple game of asteroids. Consider the universe of a video game. On the surface, it looks like a twodimensional square section of the standard euclidean plane that we learned about in high school. But Something Interesting happens when our little ship jets away to avoid a collision. What just happened . Did the ship leap into hyperspace . Did it fall off the edge of its universe . Are the programmers just messing with our perceptions, trying to make the game more difficult . Or is there Something Else going on . Well, Something Else is going on. In reality, the ship is simply traveling around its universe, going on a perfectly co
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