How long does it take to tangle headphone wires in a bag or pocket? Just a few seconds, scientists say.
Using computer simulation, the team of physicists solved the phenomenon of instantaneous entanglement of wires. It turns out that it's all about the spirals. When shaking, coils are formed with which the free end of the wire is tangled, which creates annoying nodes, The Daily Mail reports.
Experts from the University of California at San Diego studied the probability of the formation of a node, depending on the length of the wire and other factors. Dorian Reiner and Douglas Smith confirmed that “complex assemblies are usually made in seconds,” and hard wires get tangled much less often.
Shaking the wires inside a special box showed that the nodes are formed in seconds. The scientists then analyzed the nodes using mathematical theory. As a result, they found 120 different types of nodes. In each of the 3,415 experiments, the wire formed at least 11 nodes. The work was published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Having studied all sorts of combinations, physicists have discovered that in a closed space the wires first form a spiral structure, and then lose it. Simple knots form more complex ones.
The interest in knots is due to the fact that knots play an important role in such scientific fields as quantum field theory and bioengineering. Biologists are carefully studying the processes of entanglement and disentanglement of DNA molecules in living cells and viruses, and knot theory has attracted the attention of scientists for more than a century.
The article is based on materials .
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