Assassin's water bottle - intermediate

PRE-ORDER only – Assassin's Water Bottles will be delivered in Q2 of 2025. 

Bundle includes:

• Asteroids sleeve
• Braids sleeve
• Steve Mould mini poster
• Schrödinger’s cat water bottle
• Unique P3M1 logo sleeve

Upgrade to the expert-tier bundle to get the official Assassin's water bottle along with Schrödinger’s cat water bottle, plus all unique sleeves and engineering prints.

Schrödinger’s cat water bottle:

You must not use the Assassin’s water bottle to store poison, despite what the name might suggest. If you did, one side of the bottle would be deadly while the other would not. The fate of the person or animal drinking from the bottle would depend on the unobserved actions of the pourer. Which is reminiscent of some thought experiment involving a cat. This bottle incorporates a cat head design which is half white, and half black - half dead, and half alive. It also has the Steve Mould, Vsauce and Curiosity Box logos.  Each side can hold up to 450ml of liquid, with a combined volume of 900ml. 

When demonstrating the magic trick we recommend you cover the bottle with a sleeve to hide the two compartments. Steve has unique stories for each sleeve:

Asteroids sleeve:

In the classic arcade game Asteroids, when you fly off the left edge of the screen you reappear from the right. In other words, the Asteroids universe is topologically equivalent to a cylinder. So we put it one one.  “But hold on,” I hear some of you say, “if you fly off the bottom, you reappear from the top, so the Asteroids universe is a torus.” That’s true but where would I have put the spout on a doughnut shaped water bottle?  Can you figure out why the score is 852655?  

Braids sleeve:

Alexander's Theorem states that all knots can be represented as a closed braid. In other words, any knot, in the mathematical sense, can be arranged into a ring of intertwined threads with no thread reversing direction around the ring. What a beautiful thing to embed on a cylinder!  The first knot, drawn in white, isn’t really a knot at all, it’s the unknot: just a loop of string.  The coloured knots represent all possible knots up to a crossing number of 3 (knots 3₁, 4₁, 5₁, 5₂, 6₁, 6₂, 6₃ in Alexander–Briggs notation). The last knot in black doesn’t fit the sequence. It’s the 9₄₆ knot, and it’s included on this sleeve because it is my favorite! See if you can spot it in my Elastic Knots video.

The P3M1 logo sleeve:

There are only 17 different wallpapers. Which is to say, there are only 17 planar symmetry groups. My favorite is called the p3m1 group, which is almost what is shown on the logo sleeve. If all the logos were the same, it would be p3m1. But by sharing the logos between me and Michael, I have broken that symmetry. Which is what good artists do. I’m not sure what the symmetry group is now.

Steve Mould mini poster:

At intermediate level you also get a mini version of the engineering print showing how the bottle works. Size: 8.27 inches by 11.67 inches (A4) and unsigned.