Physicists Tackle Knotty Puzzle

October 1, 2007 in Physics / General Physics
Physicists Tackle Knotty Puzzle
Digital photos of knots with computer-generated drawings based on mathematical calculations. Image credit: Dorian Raymer, UCSD

Electrical cables, garden hoses and strands of holiday lights seem to get themselves hopelessly tangled with no help at all. Now research initiated by an undergraduate student at the University of California, San Diego has resulted in the first model of how knots form.

The study, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, investigated the likelihood of knot formation and the types of knots formed in a tumbled string. The researchers say they were interested in the problem because it has many applications, including to the biophysics research questions their group usually studies.


Dorian Raymer, a research assistant working with Smith, initiated the study because he was interested in knot theory—the branch of mathematics that uses formulae to distinguish unique knots. Raymer was an undergraduate major in physics when he did the work. Smith said his own interest was piqued when he discovered that no one really knew how knots formed.




“We used the Jones polynomial—a famous math formula developed by Vaughn Jones, a mathematics professor at U.C. Berkeley—because it automatically simplifies mirror images and other knots that are identical, but look different.”

Rather than getting just a few types of knots, Smith and Raymer got all the types that mathematicians had enumerated, at least up to a certain complexity level. The longer the string, the greater was the probability of getting complex knots.

Based on these observations, the researchers proposed a simplified model for knot formation. The string forms concentric coils, like a looped garden hose, due to its stiffness and the confinement of the box. The free end of the string weaves through the coils, with a 50 percent probability of going under or over any coil. A computer simulation based on this model produced a similar pattern of simple and complex knots as observed in their experiments.

Smith and Raymer said that the model can also explain why confining a stiff string in a smaller box decreases the probability of knot formation. Increased confinement reduces the tumbling motion that facilitates the weaving of the string end through the coils. The paper cites other researchers who have proposed a similar effect to explain why knotting of the umbilical cord of fetuses is relatively rare, occurring only about one percent of the time. Confinement to the amniotic sac may restrict the probability of knotting.

Smith said that their results do not point to any magic solution to prevent knots from forming, but the project did inspire some advice for young people interested in science.

“Even today, there are still interesting scientific problems that can be studied in your garage with inexpensive, off-the-shelf materials like the ones we used in our experiments,” he said. “The most important thing is to be curious and ask good questions.”

Source: UCSD

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