Most world maps you have seen in your life are past the best time. The Mercator was designed in 1569 by a Flemish cartographer. The Shop Triple, the map style favored by National Geographic, dates back to 1921. And the Dymaxion map, compiled by architect Buckminster Fuller, debuted in a 1943 issue of Life.
Enter a new, new world map competing for global domination. As with sports, the card game can sometimes become obsolete if the best participants get stuck on the same old strategy, said J. Richard Gott, an astrophysicist from Princeton, who has mapped the entire universe before. But then comes an innovator: think Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors, who splashed three points off the parts of the court that the rest of basketball was not worth watching.
“We were almost reaching the limit of what you could do,” said Dr. Gott said. “If you wanted a significant breakthrough, you had to use a new idea.”
Dr. Gott’s version of Steph Curry’s wait-you-can-shoot-from-there-3? Also use the back of the page. Make the world map a double-sided circle, like a vinyl record. You can put the Northern Hemisphere at the top, and the Southern Hemisphere at the bottom, or vice versa. Or to put it another way: you can inflate the 3-D earth in two dimensions. And if you did, you could blow the accuracy of previous maps out of the water.
No flat map of our round world can be perfect, of course. First, peel off the earth’s skin and then pinch. This mathematical taxidermy leads to distortion. For example, if you have a Mercator projection on your walls in the classroom, you may grow up thinking that Greenland is the size of Africa (not even close) or that Alaska tissues are larger than Mexico (neither). This distorted worldview may even subconsciously prejudice you to underestimate most of the developing countries.
Shapes also change in map projections. Distances vary. Straight lines curve. Some projections, such as Mercator, are aimed at highlighting one of these concerns, which exacerbates other errors. Other cards compromise, such as the Shop Triple, so named because it tries to find a balance between three types of distortion.
From 2006, dr. Gott and David Goldberg, a cosmologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, developed a scoring system that could summarize the different types of errors. The Shop Tripel knocked out other big contenders. But one major source of distortion persisted: a mathematical incision, often running from pole to pole in the Pacific Ocean. The resulting shape can never be stretched again and retracted to the unbroken surface of a sphere. “It does violence to the world,” said Dr. Gott said.
His new kind of double-sided card, compiled with dr. Goldberg and Robert Vanderbei, a mathematician at Princeton, completely skip the topological violence. The map simply continues over the edge. You can tie a rope over the silk team; an ant could walk there. Without any cut, the Goldberg-Gott distortion of the map blows all other maps currently in use out of the water, the team reported in a draft study.
Cartographers who regularly study world maps – perhaps less than ten people – now have time to respond. “It never occurred to me that it could be done this way,” said Krisztián Kerkovits, a Hungarian cartographer who worked to develop his own projections.
But while the new card is excellent at addressing distortion, dr. Kerkovits said it also poses a new weakness. You can only see half of the planet at a time, unlike the Store Triple and Mercator. This undermines the basic premise of deleting the entire world for inspection on one page or screen.
For Dr. God, this is no different than the 3D globe itself. But Dr. Kerkovits is not entirely sure: you can always turn a globe to see the neighbors from a chosen point. But in that double-sided map, you might have to turn the whole thing around.
Ultimately, the success of a card depends on the applications for which it is used and how its popularity grows over time. Dr. Gott, whose paper also offers double-sided projections of Jupiter and other worlds, provides the new map style as a physical object to turn in your hands.
You can cut one out of a magazine, or you can store an entire stack of it in a thin sleeve with different planets or different data layers. And he hopes you may be tempted to try making your own print and using it with the attachment of his article.
“Stick it back-to-back with double-sided tape – I think it’s better than Elmer’s Glue, but you can use glue,” said Dr. Gott said. Then cut it out. “Maybe use paper,” he added.