Saved in:
| Main Authors: | , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06830 |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| _version_ | 1866909831096434688 |
|---|---|
| author | Ziebert, Falko Kulić, Igor M. |
| author_facet | Ziebert, Falko Kulić, Igor M. |
| contents | There is this old, eternal question: Why don't animals have wheels? In this perspective we show that they actually do. And they do so in a physically extraordinary way -- by combining incompatible elasticity, differential geometry and dissipative self-organization. Nature's wheel -- the ``wheel-within'' -- has been mysteriously concealed in plain sight, yet it spins in virtually every slender-body organism: in falling cats, crocodilians spinning to subdue their prey, rolling fruit-fly larvae, circumnutating plants and even in some of our own body movements. Flying somehow under the radar of our cognition, in recent years the wheel-within also tacitly entered the field of soft robotics, finally opening our eyes for its ubiquitous role in Nature. We here identify its underlying physical ingredients, namely the existence of a neutrally-stable, shape-invariant and actively driven elastic mode. We then reflect on various man-made realizations of the wheel-within and outline where it could be spinning from here. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_06830 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | The Hidden Wheel-Within Ziebert, Falko Kulić, Igor M. Soft Condensed Matter Biological Physics There is this old, eternal question: Why don't animals have wheels? In this perspective we show that they actually do. And they do so in a physically extraordinary way -- by combining incompatible elasticity, differential geometry and dissipative self-organization. Nature's wheel -- the ``wheel-within'' -- has been mysteriously concealed in plain sight, yet it spins in virtually every slender-body organism: in falling cats, crocodilians spinning to subdue their prey, rolling fruit-fly larvae, circumnutating plants and even in some of our own body movements. Flying somehow under the radar of our cognition, in recent years the wheel-within also tacitly entered the field of soft robotics, finally opening our eyes for its ubiquitous role in Nature. We here identify its underlying physical ingredients, namely the existence of a neutrally-stable, shape-invariant and actively driven elastic mode. We then reflect on various man-made realizations of the wheel-within and outline where it could be spinning from here. |
| title | The Hidden Wheel-Within |
| topic | Soft Condensed Matter Biological Physics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06830 |