Wear your own theory!

The idea of random knitting arose out of contact with polymer theoreticians and a desire to create an unusual two-dimensional representation of a random network. The prospect of a meeting on polymers stimulated the production of the pullover shown here. I have been encouraged to write a description of the design for the benefit of readers of New Scientist by colleagues and fellow commuters on the train, who were surprised to see me using a random number table as a knitting pattern.

The pullover shown was knitted from a standard pattern, with random network panels in the centre, front and back.

The random network

A cabling row is worked every four rows as follows. The pattern requires a list of random numbers. Each digit is read one by one and provides the instructions for the cabie. The key for the instructions is as follows:

• 1 and 2: transfer the next three stitches to a cable needle and bring them to the front of the work, knit three stitches and then knit the three stitches on the cable needle.
• 3 and 4: as 1 and 2, but this time putting the cable needle to the back of the work.
• 5, 6, 7 and 8: knit three stitches.
• 9 and 0: ignore and go on to the next digit.

Because of the difficulty in working out from the appearance of the work which number one has reached, it is advisable to mark this on the pattern, because repetition of a stretch of random numbers results in a non-random pattern. The pattern for the random network panel is therefore:

knit 1 row, *purl 1 row, knit 1 row, purl 1 row, cable 1 row using random number table*, repeat from * to * until the required length has been reached.

It will be immediately apparent that there will be end-effects, because, at the edges, a "half cable-stitch" is not possible. The practice that I adopted in making this pullover, which is not a solution to this problem, was to replace the desired "half cable-stitch" by knitting three stitches plain. Thus, if the pattern requires a cable stitch to be commenced on the last three stitches of the panel of random network, they are in fact knitted plain; the next cabling row is then begun with "knit 3" before resuming the pattern at the point where I left off at the end of the previous cabling row.

Practical uses

Developments in elementary particle physics suggest that the four fundamental forces may be described in a unified theory by regarding the elementary particles as "superstrings" existing in 10 dimensions. The two-dimensional analogue described above is readily deformed by the wearer so that gravity-like effects on the strings can be studied by personal inspection. This approach has been criticised by pedants as "woolly minded".

Mary Griffin is a physical scientist at the AFRC Institute of Food Research, Reading Laboratory. She knits in her spare time.