Why earphones get tangled so spontaneously
Getting earphones awfully tangled every time we just relax for music is bound to be hell for everyone. But this isn't really that mysterious. There's some solid grasping science behind it. Afterall, the tangling of the earphone is a special case of the tangling of a string spontaneously and that's a matter of chance again! Most people can solve a Rubix cube faster than they can untangle their earphones.
This may sound ludicrous, but scientists consider the problem of earphones very seriously. Granted, their interest isn’t solely due to their desire to listen to music, but rather because of a mathematical theory known as the knot theory, the purpose of which is to figure out how on earth random things get tangled all by themselves. Knot theory was developed in the 1800s, long before earphones were invented, and since then, scientists have been fascinated by this unexplained phenomenon, as it applies to cables, shoelaces, wires etc. They all seem to want to be tangled. It was the year 2007 when two physicists decided to take a fresh look at this modern-day problem. Physicist Douglas Smith and his then-undergraduate student Dorian Raymer performed experiments by placing a string into a box before tumbling the box for about 10 seconds. They performed this experiment roughly 3,000 times with strings of different length, boxes of different size, and varying rotation rates of tumbling. They applied the famous knot theory to their results and published their study in the paper: “The spontaneous knot of an agitated string”. In the study, they found that almost 50% of the time, the string would form a knot by itself.
According to the paper, the chances of a string getting tangled depends on its length. A string of length less than 46cm will hardly ever get tangled, but the probability of a string getting tangled increases with an increase in the length of the string. A string up to a length of 2 meters has about a 50% chance of getting tangled; however, strings longer than 2 meters seem cramped in the box, so the probability of them getting tangled does not increase past 50% with additional length.
A typical earphone has a length of about 120 cm-160 cm, so every time you put your earphones in your pocket, there is a 50% chance that you’ll be irritated the next time you pull out your earphones for some music. It doesn’t take much time for a neatly placed string to get into an awful mess inside a box. As shown in the diagram, all it takes is one end of a string crossing the other end twice to form a spontaneous knot.
In short, scientists are saying that there is nothing you can do to prevent your earphones from getting tangled up when you put them in your pocket. It’s all a matter of luck, unless you neatly fold the earphone into a box provided by the manufacturer.
The Knot Theory
Length of the String
A typical earphone has a length of about 120 cm-160 cm, so every time you put your earphones in your pocket, there is a 50% chance that you’ll be irritated the next time you pull out your earphones for some music. It doesn’t take much time for a neatly placed string to get into an awful mess inside a box. As shown in the diagram, all it takes is one end of a string crossing the other end twice to form a spontaneous knot.
In short, scientists are saying that there is nothing you can do to prevent your earphones from getting tangled up when you put them in your pocket. It’s all a matter of luck, unless you neatly fold the earphone into a box provided by the manufacturer.
Basically, it’s just a daily problem that we all have to face…oh, the struggles of modern life. At least now you know why your earphones seem to hate you, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying!
