[DerekL]

I think the title removed the wrong words to make it fit into 80 characters. The actual title is “The key to why the universe exists may lie in an 1800s knot idea science once dismissed”. Removing “why the” makes the title ungrammatical. Removing just “science once dismissed” from the end would work better.

[dang]

The article's title is too baity for HN so I lifted a phrase from the paper itself. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45696368

[pinkmuffinere]

For convenience @dang, the new suggested title is

The key to why the universe exists may lie in an 1800s knot idea

When I first read the existing title I was also very confused

[dang]

I agree that that would be a good way to shorten it, but the title itself needs to be changed ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). "Key to why the universe exists" is linkbaity, and "1800s knot idea" appears misleading, since the intersection between what Kelvin said and what these researchers are saying appears to be just "knots".

Edit: The mention of Kelvin's original idea does make the article more interesting though!