Tying Myself in Knots

I’ll be appearing this Thursday, September 3, at the newly-reopened Whitechapel Gallery’s Study Studio as part of “Knot Night”, hosted by sculptor Richard Wentworth. Richard has produced a box (or vitrine, if you want to be all art-world about it) called “A Confiscation of String” for the Gallery, and so a few of us have been dragged in to talk about string, knots, and pretty much anything else that we can free-associate to from there. In addition to Richard and me, we’ll have Kings College Material Engineer Mark Miodownik, and Priyesh Mistry, founder of something called “The Knit Crowd” at the Ruskin School of Art.

I don’t know much about what the others will be talking about. But even worse, I don’t know much about what I’ll be talking about. The obvious physics connections are cosmic strings and string theory — any other ideas? (You can also participate in other ways: “To add string to the collection email confiscationofstring@whitechapelgallery.org”.)

The event is officially sold out, but if you show up at the Whitechapel on Thursday evening after 6, you might just find some tickets available.