Creative Experimenting Using Rubber Bands

Introduction: Science History

“What’s the matter with matter?”

For some time I have been preparing a set of lessons, on various topics from material science, chemistry, and physics, to geology, astronomy, and even economics, using a common rubber band! The most important things you will need to know to perform the "creative experiments contained within the book are

1. A rubber band can stretch and regain its shape

2. A rubber band can oscillate

3. A rubber band can break

All of the experiments make use of these simple facts, however, there are many other ideas to consider in studying the rubber band including: chemistry, thermodynamics, electrical conductivity, and other topics which have a close relationship to it.

Then there's the question of motion-what is motion? How can I measure it?

In this text, I will draw heavily from the work of three major scientists: Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, since their works lay the foundations of what we know about matter and the universe, and how we know it! Also, a few others like the "pre-Socratic philosophers in ancient Greece, who were the first to conjecture about the ultimate nature of the material world, and the works of Gauss and Riemann, who established the beachhead for Einstein's work in relativity.

Along the way, other ideas in science will get introduced such as the theories of catastrophe and chaos, in the hope that their addition will help the reader to see the large scale motions of the universe in the micro- and macroscopic world of the rubber band.

My purpose in writing this book is to provide a way for the intellectually curious to find out for themselves how things really work by experimenting, observing, and examining the same test article (a rubber band) from many different points of view. Can a simple rubber band be like a “Eudoxan Sphere” helping us to model the inner world hidden inside the rubber band?

The beauty of using the rubber band for this purpose is that its own characteristics are so favorable. It has a comfortable physical size, weight, and density to be measured easily using lab scales, rulers and micrometers, while many of its important physical characteristics like its “natural frequencies” can be easily measured using a “stop watch” instead of more complex and costly equipment.

A rubber band can be used as a “highly representative example of matter,” demonstrating all the important physical qualities, which if mediated upon by observation, can reveal just what is so remarkable about it! Rubber bands are ideal for this, there a little like finding the "primordial substance” that Thales sought in his ideas about water.

In the same way that the practical needs of builders led them to draw real lines on the curved earth for the purposes of construction, city planning, and mapping, and this practical need led mathematicians and cartographers to create “non-Euclidean geometry” (a geometry which is not based on the assumption that all parallel lines diverge at infinity), so too does the observing of the motions of rubber bands lead us to an understanding of the qualities and characteristics of matter in motion, which helps us understand how to bridge a gap from the old physics of mechanics with the new modern physics! There is an entire universe down inside a rubber band containing gas, plasma, atoms, electrons, photons and par