science

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Ha! I like the honesty to admit to something like that. I am sympathetic, but I find my views on these issues get complex.

Science is usually based on what we know so far and what there is to know in the future.

Something that defies the law of physics happened to my cloths. Something that nobody I ask, or any book I can read will explain to me.

I could try this a gazillion times and still not get it to happen over again, huh.
1: Get a thick, hard black string made possibly of cotton and polyester.
2: Get bluish, very hard plastic beads that aren’t tiny or really big either.
3: Make necklace and sew it into dry clean fabrics with blue dyes. Stitch it real good, and glue if you must! It must not come off or out of it.
4: Find standard washing machine that eats quarters.
5: Put in regular house hold soaps. Tide or grocery brand. (whatever….)
6: Cold wash. No heat.
7: Good luck with that

Last edited by LiendaBalla on 13 May 2012, 2:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

What happened?

ruveyn

There was this dry clean only shirt that I put into the machine by mistake. When I went back, the beads were on the bottom of the machine in ok condition, while the shirt and the attached string was also in ok condition like before. No breaking, melting, etc. Mom prefers we wash cloths on cold cycle to. They didn't make a necklace anymore. Of all the stuff there is with technology, I kind of expected someone would have had an idea of what goes on there, but apparently not.

I wore the outfit a while after that with that bare string hanging off and looking lonely without it's beads. Then I eventually got rid of it without thinking about it being odd. I wander what else fell down where it shouldn’t.

Was it a closed loop of string which broke or was it a piece of string with a knot in one end to stop the beads coming off?

If there was a knot involved, especially with a bit of string made with natural fibres when it gets wet the knot will get a lot smaller, the cleaning products you added acted as a lubricant and the shaking around in a washing machine did the rest.

No mystery and no defying the laws of physics involved. People have known about shrinking ropes for thousands of years, sailing ships have to take this phenomenon into account when rigging as the forces involved in the contraction are strong enough to snap wooden beams or break the rope.

To avoid this happening in future just soak the string/rope when you are making the jewellery and make sure the wet knot is big enough to stop the beads coming off.

I mean for an experiment, I'd have to make sure the string didn't break, yeah. That's where I'm really doo doo headed.... is tossing the evidence I had. Now I really WISH I could make more for people to see, but I simply cannot right now. No school. No money for school. No @#$ job to get money for school. Books aren't helping much so far. Asking questions isn't helping either. Need to put my hands and fingers in that serious stuff, and I'm already soon to be 34. Grr... I know, we only live so long.

*deep breath* Ok. I'll try to put more if it helps point out the strange.
1: The outfit was purchased from Blair by us around the late 1990s and somewhere in the early 2000s. Somewhere around that time line. It was a dry clean only outfit. Stretchable belt line, soft fabric in blue. The top was short sleeved and blue print of some kind. Maybe flowers, I cannot remember. Dark blue pants, and no print. (shirt-print.... pants-no print) In the shoulder parts of the shirt, and up where the fabric is stitched together, the ends of the string had been attached within. The fabric went around these ends of the string to keep them in place longer, I think. Stitched in by at least a couple of inches. The string that was attached had one blue disk bead in the center (could easily come off any time), and six others in silver and blue with the string through the center of them (Can't come off without removing thread and string), as a necklace typically is. The string wasn't a sewing thread string. It was a bit larger than that. Common type, right? Sears? JC penny? Outfits that have really cheap necklace parts stitched to something?
2: Ordinary washing machine in the washroom of the apartment complex at Whittington drive in Houston Texas, right across from a gas station. It took quarters to run. I put the outfit in there, and set it on the cold water cycle. Mother wants all cloths washed on cold cycle. I probably used either Gain or Tide.
3: I come back an hour later (Sometime around noon), feeling like an idiot for putting in a dry clean outfit into a washing machine. Opened machine, and pulled out the shirt and various cloths. I looked at the still attached string, and think "What?!" It was bare of all the beads. Not one was on it anymore. The ends were still where they were before, and that was inside the shoulder stitches. I wore it that way for a while after that. No beads, and the string just hanging off empty. It the string looked broken, I would have snipped it off sooner. I showed my Mother that, and she thought it was strange to. Showed my sister, but she forgot about it, so when I remind her, she thinks I'm full of it, which sucks honestly. The string was a little rougher feeling, but that's it for the big black string.
4: I lost half of those beads to the bottom of that machine. I couldn't get in there and pull the rest out. I pulled out the little blue disk bead, one silver and two bluish ones, I think. (Giving you the best out of my memory here.) They were fine to. Hard plastic blue ones. The silver was the only painted one, I believe. It was a little scratched, but that was about it for them. No breaking, no melting, all in one piece like nothing happened in there. (When I'm being literal, I am being it.) They weren't the tiny kind. They were more half the size of those candy beads, and they were made of hard plastics. Maybe sears of jc penny sells outfits that have necklace parts to outfits with the thick, round width string type on it? It certainly wasn't sewing string. Way bigger than that. I'm not dumb enough to confuse the two. Thank you.

Ok. Heheh. I think that's plenty for that here. I stick by saying it's a mystery. I don't want to hyjack the thread by typing about it further here to.

I'm not sure I can answer this with a yes or no answer. Science cannot answer questions about the existence of things we have no knowledge of. But maybe there are no no things we have no knowledge of. I highly doubt it though.

I would go as far as to say that science doesn't rigorously prove anything. There is a threshold for reasonable believableness that people tend to settle on.

Really?

So when hundreds of millions of people do an experiment and always get the same the result do you not consider the matter settled?

I know you are going to snort at the suggestion that hundreds of millions are somehow scientists but how many people do you think have looked down a microscope and seen a cell in the last few centuries?

Do you not think the argument about whether or not we are made of cells has been settled by science?

How about the basic elements, do you still believe that there are four elements, earth, air, fire and water or has science settled that one aswell?

Science rigorously proves lots and lots of things and disproves even more, it seems you have taken the position that if science can not answer every single question it is possible to form using words then all science is rubbish. If you want that level certainty in your life so that you can stop thinking, go find religion and close your mind, don't let little things like evidence or reality trouble you anymore.

Until you want a vaccine or cure of course.

Or a car, or a computer, or a television or electricity...

So called indisputable evidence can be disputed. The evidence is indisputable to the extent that results of experiment are accepted and the means by which the experiment is carried out is accepted. Any experiment requires specification of initial value and boundary values. There is no absolute proof that the conditions which the experiment requires have been met. Each repetition of the experiment opens the possibility that the initial or boundary conditions have not been met or that some factor in the environment is influencing the outcome of the experiment. No two repetitions of an experiment can be show absolutely to replicate initial or boundary conditions.

In addition experiments are theory laden and assume the correctness of some underlying theory which cannot be show absolutely.

That is why physical theories can be disproved but not absolutely proved.

ruveyn

Gravity is a theory.

Drop something heavy to the floor and tell me that is just a theory. Gravitation is a fact. The laws of gravitation are a theoretical artifact. We have at least three theories of gravitation all of which are corroborated in the moderate gravitation field of the sun and planets of the solar system. Which theory holds up in the wild places near the event horizon of a black hole remains to be determined.

ruveyn

I meant what I said.

Let's say someone draws a line on a piece of paper. I just tell them that they drew a circle.

I'm not anti-science by the way.

You told them wrong. No one can physically draw a circle or a straight line segment. The streak you lay down on paper or a blackboard has width. The circumference of a circle has no width.

ruveyn

Purely out of curiosity (and in no way to make any kind of point; these little bits of math trivia fascinate me), if the things you draw are not line segments or circles, what the hell are they? Representations thereof? Or do they have their own name?