Knot Theory

by Larry DeWitt

My wife is in touch with laws of nature of which I am completely oblivious; and when she points out one of these secret laws to me, as she often does, I am always deeply puzzled--but I go meekly along. This weekend she informed me that it was time for the annual Fall replacement of our bed sheets, blankets, shower curtains and draperies. This is something we do twice a year, once in the Spring and once in the Fall, according to some ancient Aztec astronomical wisdom, which has come down to her as a genetic heritage. And there is some sort of esthetic involved, as there is a "style theme" which matches up to the appropriate season. This too eludes me. I know, from rote learning, which blankets and drapes go up in the Fall and which in the Spring. But how they match up with their seasons is the deepest of mysteries. And when new blankets and drapes appear in our home I never commit myself as to their place in Nature until my wife sends some kind of signal. Best to be silent and be thought a fool . . .

But it is the ruffles which really bother me. You see, the drapes all have these things called valences, whose function completely eludes me since they seem far too insubstantial to be of much use. Anyway, these valences are all bunched together at the top in what I suppose would be called ruffles. So we play this game where I stand on a ladder adjusting this row of ruffles, first a little here and then a little there and then some more back where I started, and then a little down at the other end, and on and on. All the time my wife stands back and shakes her head disapprovingly. "They're not even," she insists. Even? How can this chaos of bunched up material be more or less even? It's all just a jumble of bunched up ruffles--they all look the same to me. What could it possibly mean to say that the chaos over here is not even with the chaos over there? Either my wife is capable of feats of perceptual discrimination that surpass my understanding, or she's just jerking me around. Sometimes I turn around real quick to see if she's snickering behind my back while I vainly attempt to even out the ruffles. I haven't caught her at it yet, but I have my suspicions.

All of this troubles me a little, but I see it as part of those vast areas of mystery involving gender differences which I long since gave up trying to fathom. Much more annoying to me is a huge unsolved mystery of science involving Knot Theory.

Every Fall I put the garden hoses away in the storage shed out back. I roll them up in a neat loop and I place them on a shelf in the shed, along with the 50 ft. electrical extension cords, and the badminton net. Every Spring when I open the shed and take out the hoses for the first time I find they all tangled up in a hopeless mess! Kinked and crimped and twisted. And the electrical cords are no longer in a neat loop--they are all tied in knots! And the badminton net--my God, the badminton net. The badminton net is so twisted and tangled, with so many little knots upon knots upon knots, that it takes me a whole day of frustration and profanity to put it back into working shape. And if you place a piece of rope in your "junk drawer" it will somehow tie itself in knots that you did not put there! How can this possibly happen. I swear I did not touch those hoses and cords and nets since I put them away. How do these knots appear in my garden hoses? What force of nature tied those hundreds of knots in my badminton net? That's the Knot Theory I want to know about!

Now there is a discipline in mathematics called Knot Theory, and its purpose is to describe, with exquisite precision, how tangled things are--but not how they became tangled. There are serious-minded professional mathematicians in universities across our land who can compute the exact degree of tangledness of my garden hose. But if you were to ask these clever mathematicians just what force of nature tangled the hose in the first place, you would get a chorus of blank looks. "Not our job man." Well whose job is it, I want to know. The physicists won't touch it. The mathematicians don't dirty their hands in that way. Nobody even asks the question. We all just go through life struggling with our garden hoses and badminton nets and we never seem to question why the universe is treating us this way.

Well I am here to tell you that there is an unknown force of nature at work here. A force absent from the textbooks of modern physics. A force which complicates our lives constantly. I think we should call this force Perversity. It is Perversity which ties unwatched ropes into knots and unused garden hoses into kinks and twists and crimps and stored badminton nets into tangles so grotesque that half the summer is wasted trying to untangle them. And if there were a scientific discipline worthy of the name Knot Theory, it would tell us about the mysterious workings of the force of Perversity in our universe.