Sun, 01 Jan 2012

Things I wonder about

OMG Facts cited this study of why strings like your headphones get tied into knots in your pocket. It's one of those things that I have always wondered about. Why, when you put away the Christmas lights neatly at the end of the season do they come out of the box next season all tied into knots. Well, someone has obviously too much time on their hands and actually performed a scientific study to give us the answer. I didn't read the entire study -- I don't have that sort of free time, but, they performed 3,415 trials to answer this question. As it turns out

It is well known that a jostled string tends to become knotted; yet the factors governing the “spontaneous” formation of various knots are unclear. We performed experiments in which a string was tumbled inside a box and found that complex knots often form within seconds. We used mathematical knot theory to analyze the knots. Above a critical string length, the probability P of knotting at first increased sharply with length but then saturated below 100%. This behavior differs from that of mathematical self-avoiding random walks, where P has been proven to approach 100%. Finite agitation time and jamming of the string due to its stiffness result in lower probability, but P approaches 100% with long, flexible strings.

I'm not certain what a selfpavoiding random walks are, but your headphones are long, flexible strings. Now if they could just study Breedlove's law of plugs which states

A plug will always plug into the socket in the opposite direction that it naturally lays.

posted 09:43 [/SimpleThings] permanent link