This Scientist Has a Hidden Warehouse of 4-Dimensional Bottles

If a man who looked exactly like a mad scientist told you he had a secret underground warehouse filled with thousands of 4-dimensional glass shapes, you probably wouldn't venture into his basement to check it out, right? Fortunately Brady Haran of the popular YouTube channel Numberphile threw caution to the wind and followed the aforementioned mad scientist—actual scientist and author Cliff Stoll—on a tour of his impressively homespun business, ACME Klein Bottles.

Klein Bottles, for the uninitiated, are "closed, non-orientable, boundary-free manifolds"; basically two Möbius strips sewn together to create a single-sided, zero-volume bottle. In other words, they're neat-looking mathematical curiosities that Stoll manufactures and sells to other mathematics fanatics over the internet.

In the video, Stoll is giddy to the point of jumping up and down as he explains how he started making his 3D representation of Klein bottles, grinning ear to ear as he effuses about math and science. He then opens up a secret compartment to a crawl space underneath his house filled with thousands of Klein bottles—not filled with the insane experiments that such a setting calls for.

Stoll explains very matter-of-factly that "this is how you run a warehouse," before using the robotic helper he hand-assembled from various bits to retrieve a couple cases of his bottles. The bottles, which he makes in huge quantities to keep his production costs down, stretch from one end of his house to another. They're also definitely not being used for anything nefarious. Definitely not.