Third December Knot Joins Previous Knots in What Experts Call ‘Light Archaeology’
PARIS — The box of Christmas lights retrieved from the storage cupboard on the first Sunday of December by Sylvie Aubert contains, this year as in every year, a knot of such specific density that it suggests the lights actively worked during their eleven months of storage to achieve a configuration that none of their component parts could have reached independently. Sylvie has timed herself. The 2024 untangling took forty-seven minutes. The 2023 untangling took thirty-one minutes. The lights are longer in 2024 than in 2023 because of the additional strand purchased last January at 70% off, stored in the same box, now part of the same knot.
“I bought the second strand to add more light,” Sylvie confirmed. “The second strand has added more knot.” The second strand’s integration into the primary knot occurred in storage. The integration happened through a mechanism that neither physics nor Sylvie’s understanding of physics fully explains. The box was closed. The box was in the cupboard. The knot now contains both strands, in configurations that the original manufacturers did not intend and that cannot be reversed without the forty-seven minutes.
The Knot Science
The knot is not accidental. Physicist research has confirmed that strings stored in confined spaces spontaneously form knots through a process driven by thermodynamic probability: the number of possible knotted configurations vastly exceeds the number of untangled ones, so random motion — vibration from nearby traffic, thermal expansion — tends toward knot formation. The lights are obeying physics. The physics are unhelpful. The forty-seven minutes are the solution. The lights are on the tree. They look excellent.
According to CNRS physics research on string topology, the probability of spontaneous knot formation in flexible filaments approaches 1.0 over timescales of months in typical storage conditions. Both strands have satisfied this probability. The untangling is the annual conversation with physics. Physics won again. The tree is lit.
Brilliantly illuminating at Virtuosal.com.
