MIT Physicists Have Finally Cracked Overhand Knots

An anonymous reader writes: Knots are indeed a relatively ancient art, a technology developed across centuries of trial and error and some very old, intuitive notions of symmetry and elegance. (The more 'ugly' or random a knot looks, the less likely it is to function well.) The basic physics and mechanics of knots are, however, relatively unstudied scientifically. If a knot works then it works—what more is there to ask? Quite a bit, it turns out. In a study recently accepted for publication in the Physical Review Letters, engineers at MIT and Pierre et Marie Curie University in Paris offer a new fundamental theory of knots based on relationships between topology, the mathematics of spatial relationships, and the basic mechanics of friction and pliability.