It's a ladder that resembles a "ghost hitting the wall": when you walk clockwise, you go down forever; when you walk counterclockwise, you always go up. The most amazing thing is that after a while you will find that you will always return to the original point and fall into an infinite loop. The name of this staircase is: Penrose Ladder.
Now there's a question, do you think it exists in reality? I believe that most people think it is impossible. But in April 2013, someone uploaded a video with a magical stairwell, as if the Penrose Stairs had been restored in reality! So where does this stairwell come from? Is it true?
It all started in 1958, when the British mathematician Roger Penrose and his father, Leonid Penrose, came up with a mathematical model, the Penrose Ladder. Dutch artist Moritz Escher was inspired to create a painting called "Up and Down the Ladder" in 1960.
The most attractive thing about this painting is the roof of the castle, where a group of people walk on four flights of stairs. Some people go all the way up, some people go all the way down, and the magic is that no matter how they go, they will eventually return to the original point, which perfectly restores the Penrose Ladder. Since then, people have begun to create works about the Penrose Ladder, but no one has been able to restore it in reality.
On April 30, 2013, someone posted a video on YouTube. At the beginning of the video, two presenters, a man and a woman, appear, wearing orange T-shirts with the letters "RIT" written on their chests. "RIT" is an abbreviation for Rochester Institute of Technology, the second oldest private polytechnic university in the history of the United States.
The video looks like a promotional video produced by the school, and after introducing the school's recent situation, the two hosts talk about a very magical stairwell in the school, which is called "Escher's Stairwell", which was built by a Filipino architect in 1968. Legend has it that this staircase, whether going up or down, will return to its original position.
Next, the video program switched to the polytechnic campus, and after interviewing several students, the host went directly to "Escher's Stairwell". In order to verify its truth, the host spoke while walking up the stairs on the left, and then a magical scene appeared, the host had just gone upstairs, but at this time he came up from downstairs.
Then, the host called in an Asian female student, and after a brief introduction to the magic of the stairwell, the female student said that she did not believe it. So the hostess asked the schoolgirl to walk up alone, and he waited where he was. When the female student came upstairs, a magical scene occurred, and the female student met the host who was waiting in place. Obviously, she was frightened and hurried downstairs, but she met the host again.
After shocking the female students, the program team invited several more people to come. Like the schoolgirls, they felt the collapse of their worldview in the stairwell. For the sake of the program effect, the host found a black brother, who asked the brother to wait in the same place and go downstairs by himself. On the way, he had a group of people holding hands and tightly enclosed the stairs. When he went down, the magical scene reappeared, and he met the black brother again. The two men began to fight and celebrate, and everyone else in the room said that the stairwell was amazing. As soon as the scene turned, the two hosts in orange T-shirts reappeared, and after they broadcast some tips for school activities, the whole video ended.
After the video was released, it immediately spread throughout the Internet, causing the mathematical model of the "Penrose Ladder" to become a hot search on the Internet. Many people began to go to the Polytechnic to look for stairwells, but what they did not expect was that none of the students in the school knew the location of the stairs.
Some people began to question that the Penrose Ladder could not be achieved in three-dimensional space, and this video must have been filmed by borrowing twins. Some people think that there must be such a stairwell in the polytechnic, but the school does not want everyone to know.
Seeing that the incident was going to develop from the perspective of conspiracy theory and occult, the original author of the video, Michael, a master's student at the Polytechnic Institute, released a clarification video. In the video, he says that he is a student in the School of Film and Animation, and that Escher's stairwell does not actually exist, and that he is working on a project for his thesis.
Video producer Michael
Michael made a lot of preparations to shoot the video of the stairwell, including hiring actors and writing the script. The identities of the hosts and Asian female students in the video are all fake, and they are all practitioners in the photography industry. Even the builder of the stairwell was a fake news spread by Michael in advance. However, as for how the video was made, Michael did not say, he did not want to publicize these shooting techniques. Five years after the video was released, a channel on YouTube completely revealed the filming method of the video.
When the host first shows the stairwell, he is walking upwards, and the angle of the camera is followed upwards, so that the lower right corner of the picture is obscured. The most critical step is that the host completely disappears into the picture, the camera should pause the camera, the host can take advantage of this time to quickly move downstairs, and when the camera is turned on again, he will slowly walk up, so that a magical scene is formed.
The picture of the Asian female student requires the cooperation of the photographer and the stuntman. When she first walked up, the photographer had to follow closely behind, at this time the host was not there, and the female students in the picture also disappeared, at this time the host can take the opportunity to come upstairs, using the pause and post-editing just now, you can successfully meet the host for the first time. Then, the female student hurried upstairs, the host did not move, then need to appear in a stand-in, she needs to go downstairs, shoot a faceless back. When the stand-in went downstairs, the female student who had just gone upstairs went downstairs at this time, so that the effect of meeting the host for the second time was formed.
The encounter with the black brother is actually the operation of post-editing. When the host and the little brother finished talking, he went down, and there was a frame that stayed on the host's shirt, which was to use this picture to stitch together the host and the little brother's subsequent encounters through post-editing.
After the stairwell was revealed, in addition to praising Mike's superb photography skills, people also lamented the magic of the "Penrose Staircase". The "Penrose Ladder", as a well-known geometric paradox, has been shown to be impossible to achieve in three-dimensional space, like the Klein bottle. You can imagine that in reality, if you keep going up, the end point will be higher than the point, and they will never coincide. If one day, you find yourself in such a place, then congratulations, you may have entered the four-dimensional space.
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