The Pursuit of Nothingness

In accordance with my life's ambition (refer to post title), I brewed a large cup of tea this morning and conducted an extremely important experiment. It involved calculating the exact duration of time for which a biscuit dipped in a cup of hot tea would survive without parts of its anatomy dropping off. Ever since I can remember, I've had an unhealthy fascination for dipping a biscuit in tea and waiting till the exact moment when the dipped part becomes too soggy to hang on to the dryer part of the biscuit. It's like playing a dangerous game with oneself. A second too late, and you will be left to fish out a mutilated biscuit with half its body lying on the teabed. I resolved, therefore, to find the best biscuit to play teatime hangman with.

Behold, mortals, the diagram I now present in front of you.

Now, Let A be the biscuit. We shall not be petty and quibble about brands, but stick to the composition instead.

Let B be the teacup, with an adequate amount of tea in it. Here you may quibble about the brand, not that it matters.

Let C be the angle at which the biscuit is made to approach the teacup. This is of no significance whatsoever, I just put it in to make the picture look more mathematical. It helps to have a diagram instead of a cartoon when you're trying to convince people of an experiment's veracity. Wouldn't want to look frivolous now, would we. Hence, the angle is useless, provided you're not idiotic enough to dunk the entire biscuit in hot tea at one go. Then you need therapy.

Let D (not in the diagram) be the minimum dipping time, which allows you to fish out the biscuit whole (part soggy and part crispy, but one unspoiled biscuit all the same).

Taking into account the above, this is what I found out:

• A digestive biscuit will stay whole for around four seconds.
• An arrowroot biscuit exactly three. Same goes for Marie.
• A cream cracker, on the other hand, will stand for six to seven seconds. Hooray for the cream cracker.
• A cream biscuit (I used a Pure Magic) will stay for four till it becomes a sickly sweet mass of, well, cream and biscuit.
• A bakery biscuit will stand for two only. Loser.
• An oatmeal cookie will last five and a half.
  
• Lastly, I decided to stretch the experiment a little and introduced a piece of the spice cake that I'd baked yesterday. It sank before you could say Titanic.
  

There is one factor I didn't take into account, the hotness of the tea. Therefore, let E be the temperature of the tea.

Taking into account all of the above, I suppose it would be possible to come up with a very interesting and very complicated mathematical formula, but I am numerically challenged. If anyone finds this interesting enough to work on, I am willing to play Rosalind Franklin to your WatsonandCrick. Just mention me in your Ig Nobel acceptance speech, please.

The results of the experiment were interesting and varied. The tea by the end of it was quite undrinkable. My love for biscuits was also considerably diminished. Additionally, I got yelled at by the mater for opening all the packets for what was supposed to be a month's supply of biscuits, and had to meekly go find jars to store the remains in. Scientific progress is difficult, I tell you. Perhaps it's just as well I'm studying English.