I've always wondered what this image in Braid is. It appears on a tile in the first level of one of the worlds, but I think it appears elsewhere, too.
I don't know what it's called, and it's really hard to describe well enough to Google. All I know is that I think I've seen it elsewhere, outside of the game, before seeing it here.
What is it?
It's an illustration of Simon Stevin's problem. See http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/unwork.htm#stevinprob and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Stevin#Geometry.2C_physics_and_trigonometry
Simon Stevin's used a perpetual motion machine (or rather, its impossibility) to derive some fundamental laws of mechanics in the 16th century.
