Physicists Twist Water into Knots

More than a century after the idea was first floated, physicists have finally figured out how to tie water in knots in the laboratory. The gnarly feat, described today in Nature Physics1, paves the way for scientists to experimentally study twists and turns in a range of phenomena — ionized gases like that of the Sun’s outer atmosphere, superconductive materials, liquid crystals and quantum fields that describe elementary particles.

Lord Kelvin proposed that atoms were knotted "vortex rings" — which are essentially like tornado bent into closed loops and knotted around themselves, as Daniel Lathrop and Barbara Brawn-Cinani write in an accompanying commentary. In Kelvin's vision, the fluid was the theoretical ‘aether’ then thought to pervade all of space. Each type of atom would be represented by a different knot.
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