The Strange Room in Puerto Nuovo – Relativity (1953) by M. C. Escher https://wiki.wizard101central.com/wiki/Location:Strange_Room https://wiki.wizard101central.com/wiki/Quest:Puzzles%26_Mazes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFx3_bb45dM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.C._Escher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity(M._C._Escher)
On the trail of Fernanda Maregellan’s Clockwork Surveyor, your wizard and Ponce de Gibbon come upon an area where the mathematical precision of the previous valley has turned to madness. You discover the surveyor has been ripped to shreds. Following the trail of cogs and gears you come upon a Strange Room. The room gives Ponce de Gibbon a headache.
It is madness, the cavern has been twisted. It’s been turned inside out. Up is down. How can you possibly leave?
Maurits Cornelis Escher (June 17, 1898 – March 27, 1972) was a Dutch graphic artist who made woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints, many of which were inspired by mathematics. Despite wide popular interest, for most of his life Escher was neglected in the art world, even in his native Netherlands. He was 70 before a retrospective exhibition was held. In the late twentieth century, he became more widely appreciated, and in the twenty-first century he has been celebrated in exhibitions around the world.
His work features mathematical objects and operations including impossible objects, explorations of infinity, reflection, symmetry, perspective, truncated and stellated polyhedra, hyperbolic geometry, and tessellations. Escher’s art became well known among scientists and mathematicians, and in popular culture, especially after it was featured by Martin Gardner in his April 1966 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. Apart from being used in a variety of technical papers, his work has appeared on the covers of many books and albums.
Relativity is a lithograph print by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher, first printed in December 1953. The first version of this work was a woodcut made earlier that same year.
It depicts a world in which the normal laws of gravity do not apply. The architectural structure seems to be the center of an idyllic community, with most of its inhabitants casually going about their ordinary business, such as dining. There are windows and doorways leading to park-like outdoor settings. All of the figures are dressed in identical attire and have featureless bulb-shaped heads. Identical characters such as these can be found in many other Escher works.
In the world of Relativity, there are three sources of gravity, each being orthogonal to the two others. Each inhabitant lives in one of the gravity wells, where normal physical laws apply. There are sixteen characters, spread between each gravity source, six in one and five in each of the other two. The apparent confusion of the lithograph print comes from the fact that the three gravity sources are depicted in the same space.
The structure has seven stairways, and each stairway can be used by people who belong to two different gravity sources. This creates interesting phenomena, such as in the top stairway, where two inhabitants use the same stairway in the same direction and on the same side, but each using a different face of each step; thus, one descends the stairway as the other climbs it, even while moving in the same direction nearly side by side. In the other stairways, inhabitants are depicted as climbing the stairways upside-down, but based on their own gravity source, they are climbing normally.
The current list of all the (known) Novus references are located here.
Although I am well versed in Pop Culture references but I do not claim to have caught them all. Let me know your favorites in the comments and if I’ve missed one you caught, let me know so I can add it to the list.
Text for this article is excerpted from the linked wiki pages
The Strange Room image is from Wizard101, and is copyright of KingsIsle Entertainment. It is borrowed from Flaming Cheese’s YouTube video run through of the Quest embedded above.
M.C. Escher image is borrowed from Wikipedia. Photo by Hans Peters for Anefo. Copyright by Ga het na (Nationaal Archief NL) the Dutch National Archive. It is shared under the CC0 Creative Commons license.
Relativity image is borrowed from arthive.com It is copyright The M.C. Escher Company B.V.
Image usage qualifies as fair use under US copyright law.
Vulcan Stev's Database 