Is every point on a Menger Sponge visible from the outside?

210 Views Asked by At

Choose an arbitrary point on the surface of a Menger Sponge. Can you find a straight line starting at that point and extending beyond the sponge that doesn't intersect the sponge anywhere else? That is, is there a position and angle 'outside' the sponge from which an observer could see that point?

In one sense it seems the answer should be 'no', because a point on the sponge can be inside arbitrarily many twisting tunnels. But then again the construction of the shape means that every point is somehow 'near' the outside.

1

There are 1 best solutions below

5
On BEST ANSWER

Yes, the whole surface is visible.

You can make the sponge by starting with a cube and then drilling out a square segment form all three sides. Then you take a smaller drill and repeat the process 3*8 times and so on.

Since all you do is drilling holes, the question simplifies to "can you see the entire inner surface of a straight pipe when looking at it from one end?"
The answer to it is obviously 'yes' even though the viewing angles will become infinitesimally small.

Edit:
We can probably generalize this for other shapes and higher dimensions like this:
"For a set $S$ Every point on its surface $\partial S$ can be viewed from the outside of the convex hull of $S$ if the set complementary to $S$ can be constructed from the union of straight lines (of infinite length and of which there are infinitely many)"

This still does not cover all possible shapes, like a hourglass, but it works for the Menger Sponge, Cantor Dust and similar fractals