One of my hobbies is caving, which involves lowering myself down large holes in the ground, suspended on a length of rope. If you have ever tried abseiling or climbing you will no doubt have been reassured by the thought that, if you slip, your weight would be supported by someone else controlling a safety rope. The logistics of carrying large quantities of equipment underground deny cavers this luxury, so we dispense with the safety rope and rely on a single rope, using a technique called, unimaginatively, single rope technique (SRT).
It will be clear that the consequences of anything going wrong could be extremely serious, so cavers go to great lengths to ensure that nothing does go wrong. I will be using a bit of mathematics to explain how this works.
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