All hail Newton’s sheep ...

Long have knitters suffered the mockery of others; scorned for our love of slightly out of fashion hand made sweaters waiting for the next Scandi noir to make them fashionable again; stereotyped as sad, lonely, most likely to be eaten by their cats when they die unloved and unnoticed in a cold apartment.

The sound of ridicule would only get louder if such people knew that, under the cover of winter's cold and dark, six of us gathered at the local yarn store for a 'yarn tasting' evening, to learn about the different properties of some of the 76 breeds of sheep in this country (plus a few foreign ones). As we  knitted up sample swatches, we analysed staple (how long), micron (how thick), crimp (how curly), lustre (how shiny), plie (how many strands spun together) and spin (a smooth worsted or a rustic woollen).

And all those qualities make wool, for which farmers in this country are paid 0.84p a kilo, miraculous. Sheep fibre does no less than explain the foundational laws of physics and maths. 

Want to get your head around topology ... any knitter knows that when you accidentally twist your joining row to knit in the round you are about to embark on making a Mobius strip ... and that's Topology 101. The Mobius strip has the mathematical property of being 'unorientable', which in a time of hardening identities seems a radical thing to be making. 

Spinners will refer to 'crimp energy’; the properties of yarn that cause it to twist and curl and fight back if you try to plie it in the wrong direction. ‘You can’t fight the crimp’, thus demonstrating Newton’s 3rd law of motion: 'for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction'. 

I'd argue wool also illustrates the laws of thermodynamics. The Conservation of Energy states that  energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it can only be transformed or transferred from one form to another, i.e., from sheep to fibre to yarn to sweater. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that natural processes only run in one direction, and are not reversible. Once it's spun, there's no going back. Once it's steeked, there's definitely no going back.

So go ahead, mock as much as you want. Come the apocalypse, we're the ones you will be coming to for warm clothing and to be reminded about the underlying mechanics of reality.