Knots affect our lives in perplexing ways. They can perform life-saving assistance, such as during rock climbing, or provide Sisyphean puzzles of entanglement. Often, knots seem to have the contrarian personality of an adolescent. They loosen and unwind when you want them to stay fastened, and inevitably form tangles of confounding complexity when you seek to avoid them. These puzzling characteristics of knots were brought to mind when I read two recent articles about the scientific investigation of knots.

Why Knots Fail

The explanation of how shoelaces come untied, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, was quite prevalent in the news cycle recently. After observing slow-motion video footage of the shoelaces of a runner on a treadmill, researchers were able to explain how motion affects knots and results in untied shoelaces.

First, they observed that the failure of a knot is not a gradual process, but happens abruptly over the course of only one or two strides. This is possible due to the surprising amount of force generated by the impact of one step, which this study calculated to be an average of 7 g—more than twice the g-force experienced by the Space Shuttle upon reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere.