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The physics of knots

lightandmatter.com · 2,183 words · saved by 1 readers

There is a huge and active field of mathematics known as knot theory, but it has little to do with what sailors, mountaineers, and fishermen mean when they talk about knots made using physical pieces of cord and held together by friction. The analysis of these real-life knots has only been addressed in a very small body of scientific papers, which are not freely available on the web. The purpose of this article is to present a brief overview of this analysis, as well as a description of a few of my own experiments in which I've tried to test the theoretical predictions. My focus is on the question of whether a certain knot will slip, not whether it will fail because the rope breaks. For a discussion of the latter, see [Pieranski 2001], which includes both detailed numerical simulations and clever experiments using strands of spaghetti! The classic paper is [Bayman 1977], which presents a simple theory of hitches. For simplicity, only the frictional forces between the rope and the post

The physics of knots The physics of knots by Ben Crowell This web page uses MathML to display equations. MathML is currently supported by Firefox but not Internet Explorer, so if you're using IE, the math will probably not look right. There is a huge and active field of mathematics known as knot theory, but it has little to do with what sailors, mountaineers, and fishermen mean when they talk about knots made using physical pieces of cord and held together by friction. The analysis of these real-life knots has only been addressed in a very small body of scientific papers, which are not freely

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