Rolling Rubber Bands The rubber band, an object that nearly
everyone in the world has seen or used at some point, was the
subject of a recent study by physicists and researchers at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at École Polytechnique
in Paris, France. What might be of so much interest to a
physicist about a rubber band? It turns out that it was the
perfect object to use in experiments designed to learn more
about how elastic objects react to gravity and speed. Hundreds
of years ago Galileo used a bronze ball and rolled it down a
hillside. Eventually, his observations formed into the laws of
gravity that are so widely known about today. The researchers at
MIT and École Polytechnique replicated Galileo’s experiment in a
fashion, by taking a rubber band and placing it inside a
rotating rolling cylinder. In effect, what this did was simulate
rolling it down a hill, so that it could increase and decrease
speed while allowing the researchers to observe what happened
with precise details. Their findi