Why do duvet covers eat all the clothes in the dry-tumbler? Question from an actual 5 years old

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Hi!
My daughter has been pondering on something mysterious and the adults around her hasn´t provided any satisfactory answers at all. So she wanted me to ask the internet.

When we dry fabrics in the dry-tumbler the duvet cover more often than not swallows parts of the accompanying clothes and sheets, forcing us to turn it inside out to get to them.
“It´s just going round, round and the water goes out so why does it eat everything?

(My suggestion of dry-tumbler gnomes was quickly and rudely rejected)

In: Physics

18 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I remember an actual scientific modelling of why a bunch of strings being tossed around eventually end up forming knots.

The explanation (mathematically modelled) was that random movement has a bigger chance of causing the strings to move so that they form knots, than for an already formed knot to untie itself.

Probably the same thing, it’s a little bit more likely that something moves inside the duvet cover, and a little bit less likely that it moves out of it.

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