Serena Alagappan in Scientific American:
If you were to trace both “sides” of a Möbius strip, you would never have to lift your finger. A single-sided surface with no boundaries, the strip is an artist’s reverie and a mathematician’s feat. A typical thought experiment to demonstrate how the three-dimensional strip operates involves imagining an ant on an adventure. Picture the insect traversing the Möbius band. One apparent loop would land the ant not where it started but upside down, only halfway through a full circuit. After two loops, the ant would be back at the beginning—but dizzy.
The figurative and narrative implications of the Möbius strip are rich: when you try to go forward, you ring sideways, when you try to circle in, you find yourself outside. It’s an apt allegory for losing control. We might ask ourselves after 2020, where are we? Have we spun around after so much chaos, and found our position stagnated, back where we started? Or are we at a new beginning?
The continuum of crossing a Möbius strip is emblematic of how we experience time in a nonlinear way.
More here.