Delight Between Science and Magic: Euler’s Disk and the Sound of the Singularity

One afternoon in the late 1980s, sitting in the company cafeteria, aerospace engineer Joseph Bendik found himself so bored that he took a coin out of his pocket and began spinning it atop the table. In a testament to the eternal paradox of boredom and wonder as two sides of the same coin — the currency of life that is attention — he was suddenly wonder-smitten by the exquisite elegance of the physics making the coin seem to levitate, spinning faster and faster rather than slower and slower befor...