Losen up! - An entangled situation
Why do these frikking things always entangle in my pocket? How are they related to umbilical cords?
There's days when, all you need to know is that it's not your fault. It's not you, it's her. That things, sometimes are stubborn and there's not way of making them work. That the Universe is obsessed with ruining your plans whenever there's a chance. That it's not that you're retarded or lazy it's that, sometimes, things simply "are". Yet, the feeling remains, and you need an explanation that will allow you to finally sleep. Something that could tell you that; yes, it happened again, but you had no way of preventing it.
Something, that could redeem you from the painful sensation that is: reaching into your pocket to find your Earbuds Headphones entangled again.
I always understood that I'm anything but an organized man, abusing the excuse that the Universe tends to chaos is a great resource that loses credibility as soon as you repeat it 10 to 12 times (per day), under circumstances progressively more unbelievable, as in: turning around to check that Junior/Senior pupil's perfect ass (the kind we call "onion ass" here, it's so perfect it makes you want to cry), while you quote the second law of thermodynamics and Darwinism... Yeah, it could work as an escape, but it will make a mess... Oh, yeah! The article:
But sometimes, destiny is kind and somebody decides to analyze what happens to a wire when it's in a confined space and it is shaken periodically, an event that obsesses all of us, but a bit more to any physicist.
Engaging this enigma is rather simple and boring. Grab a bunch of wires (strings, cables, whatever), shake them and see what happens. Simple, boring, and absolutely straightforward, because they made it so well arranged and with such an obsessive method that Tom Cruise almost adopted them and took them to Vegas to count cards for him.
The amazing part is the calm it brings to see that as the wires get longer (they tried cables from 20cm to several meters long), the probability of knots forming is nearly absolute.
After repeating the experiment thousands of times (3415, to be exact) they found a pattern that showed that from the 46cm the chance of knots forming grew linearly in size until it reached the 1.5m length where it stabilized. something like 50% of knotting, even if the wire became longer and longer.
Even when these results now redeem us from any guilt over the absurd topography of that audio device, it is surprising to see that the topic does not end there. Knots have troubled mathematicians for years, to the point that in 1920, J. Alexander found a way to classify them in the shape of equations that described them precisely, this opened the gate to "knot simulation".
I'm dropping a paper here, just in case you want to check it out... OLD
Grab a computer, load it with knot models and let it know away, because understanding how little wires shaken in a confined space is no small topic, once you realize that DNA is a string in a confined space and your umbilical cord also was.
It looks like the relation between the material the wire is made of and its flexibility and size of the confined space are the responsible ones over the DNA of some viruses entangling in their capsids, yet they are also responsible of our umbilical cords (almost) never doing so.
Today, we learn a bit more about the universe, while we look at our earphones, at least until we are able of untangling viruses, or shaking 3415 pregnant women with no harm done.
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