‘It’s unpredictable,” says Oliver O’Reilly, a professor in robot-like engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. “But when it happens, it’s in two or three strides and it’s catastrophic. There’s no way of assault back from it.”

Yes, the spontaneous untying of shoelaces is merciless, by chance and irrecoverable – as O’Reilly has proved in his new study. A Berkeley team occupied a mechanical leg and a human running on a treadmill to examine why the untying hit ons. They found that neither banging a leg up and down, nor merely jerking it forward made laces untie – it was the combination of the two that did so. The stomping of the foot moderates the knot. The swinging of the foot acts like invisible approaches to separate the outer ends of the laces. By then, cataclysm is unmitigated seconds away.

O’Reilly’s research would be redundant if we lived in the in all respects that Back to the Future II promised us – with automated self-lacing hi-tops. But unfortunately, nowhere has humanity shown its capacity for regression more plainly than in the market for shoe-closing devices. Even velcro, which earmarks ofed to be winning the closure-format wars of the 80s, is now almost unheard of. Instead, we proceed to rely on a centuries-old technological bodge to finish off trainers turning on cutting- edge 3D looms.

Far worse, we have also been guided a method of tying our shoes that makes it more odds-on they will come undone: the classic bow, a waking nightmare of shoe technology. It has been known for decades that nonpareil alternatives abound. In 2005, the first-ever three-minute TED Talk was on one such ability. Terry Moore of the Radius Foundation suggested a reversal of the paradigmatic. Start as usual, but once you have a bow in your left give out, simply go under with your right hand (choose than the habitual over). The resulting knot sits far squarer to the shoe, and, mechanically, that means it unscrews less often.

O’Reilly’s study tested this possibility against the standard knot, and found it to be five times as basic. The only downside is that it’s mildly harder to teach to progenies. For those who can’t get their head around its backwards nature, the internet also approves something that has become known as Ian’s Secure Knot, after the shoelace guru who popularised it. Here, after irritating to form the base, you make two bows, cross them, then chain of events them through the hole you made as a result of crossing.

On Ian’s Shoelace Orientation, New Zealander Ian Fieggen suggests a vast array of knots. The Safe is the highest-rated by his users. His own testing, he says, reveals it to be twice as hefty as a standard knot. “Regardless of the knot used,” he suggests, “Close it off by pulling the knot nice and tight. Follow-up by pushing the particles in the centre of the knot snugly together to make the knot brief and secure.”

Fieggen laments a culture in which we have grow increasingly inured to laces that come undone. He levels out that the more rounded and the more plastic the laces, the profuse likely they are to untie. He suggests replacing anything too heavy with traditional flat laces, made from softer materials. He also endorses waxing with beeswax or rubber cement.

The key message here, supposing, isn’t about rubber cement – it’s about our common humility in the presumption of the vastness of knowledge. The next time your local pub pointy-head starts unorganized about collateralised debt obligations, just remember he to all intents doesn’t even know how to tie his own shoelaces.