Ianagol on Nostr: reading the question, it wasn’t immediately clear to me that a solution should ...

reading the question, it wasn’t immediately clear to me that a solution should exist, since one is given one parameter of freedom (α) to try to hit the identity, but the Lie group SO(3) has dimension 3. So potentially this could trace out a curve in SO(3) that doesn’t pass through the identity (except for α=0). But somehow the symmetry allows a non-trivial solution.