Turning their attention for the moment from bewildering mice, scientists in Manchester have begun applying their rigorous methods to flinging bread on the floor, in an attempt to determine why toast behaves the way it does.
Food science specialist Professor Chris Smith and his team developed a new formula that explains why the toast leaves a buttery mess on the kitchen floor, using the physics of the piece of bread in their calculations for the first time.
This is ridiculous. Bread lands butter-side down because the buttered side is heavier than the non-buttered side. That’s just common sense. Butter is heavier than no butter; the heavier side falls harder, or more, or something.
If you put weights on a cat’s feet — I am available for this experiment, as I no longer love my cat and am willing to see him fend for himself for once — and fling it off of a giant table, for example, it will land on its feet. Not just because cats generally tend to land there to begin with; this would work just as well if you put weights on your cat’s head, presumably. Heavy things fall more. Or harder. Butter + bread is heavier than bread alone.
Professor Smith and his team dropped 100 slices of toast from table height in a special lab experiment, and showed that buttering the bread means it only has the opportunity to rotate one and a half times.
However, the professor admitted the only way to end one of life’s most annoying accidents is to buy a bigger table or, even better, don’t drop the toast.
“Our research shows that sod’s law really does exist when it comes to dropped toast,” said Professor Smith.
“The upshot is that if you want to ensure your toast lands butter side up then you should invest in a higher table of approximately 8ft high that allows the toast to rotate a full 360 degrees.
A quick search of “eight foot high table” results in a great many options for eight-foot-long tables. It may be that eight-foot-high tables do not exist.
“Failing that – try not to drop the toast.”
The issue was first raised as early as 1835 with an article in a New York magazine.
The article in question was in fact a poem featured in New York Monthly Magazine, and is reproduced here in its entirety:
I never had a slice of bread,
Particularly large and wide,
That did not fall upon the floor,
And always on the buttered side!
These were boom days for poets. All one had to do was stroll into an editor’s office, grab him by the lapels, and announce “I HAVE POETRY TO SELL. I HAVE THINGS TO SAY ABOUT THE STATE OF AMERICA AND MY RED, RED BLOOD” and he’d start foaming at the mouth and flinging gold coins around until one of the fiction editors was able to finally calm him down.
The research was commissioned to mark the launch of the latest series of The Big Bang Theory on DVD, a comedy about a group of socially awkward American scientists and Professor Smith believes this issue would keep them all occupied.
He said: “The question of whether the toast does indeed always land buttered side down is exactly the kind of quandary that would keep the characters in Big Bang Theory awake at night.”
What other things would keep the characters in The Big Bang Theory awake at night, one wonders. What strange horrors fill their fictional heads as they jerk out of the dreamless in a cold and empty room?
When they sleep–if they sleep, do they dream of toast?
[Image via Flickr]
Tags: gravity, manchester, science, the big bang theory, toast
You know it’s only September right?
wtf is sod’s law? it doesn’t sound like a real thing.
Sod’s Law is the British version of Murphy’s Law. “Sod” is a mild swear word: “Sod you, mate!”, for example, or “Sod off!”
Not directed at you, BTW, just used as examples.
Yeah I know what “sod” means, that’s why it doesn’t sound real.
Other Poems About Household Mishaps
Often I wash two matching socks
Then put them into the dryer box
And when I take out either one or the other
I can never find his brother, it’s weird.
Other pressing questions that scientists have graciously answered: “Walking with coffee: why does it spill?” (http://pre.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v85/i4/e046117 and http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-br… for a not quite so technical run-down)
Oh god no it’s yet another example of the 19th century’s weird obsession with that fucking gazelle poem:
I never nurs’d a dear gazelle,
To glad me with its soft black eye,
But when it came to know me well
And love me, it was sure to die.
SOMEONE EXPLAIN TO ME how enough people were raising gazelles multiple times and suffering repeated disappointments at same for this to be a relatable statement of the human condition.
sorry about your dead gazelles dudes
Sod’s law is a name for the axiom of “bad fortune will be tailored to the individual” and “anything that can go wrong, will”.[1] “Toast will always land butter side down” is often given as an example of Sod’s law in action. The phrase is seemingly derived, at least in part, from the colloquialism an “unlucky sod”; a term for someone who has had some bad unlucky experience, and is usually used as a sympathetic reference to the person.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sod's_law
But are you a Yook or a Zook?
Wait, I want to know why you no longer love the cat!
I think it yacked on some shoes, as cats are wont to do
I am clearly no ‘food scientists’, but if it rotates 1.5 times before hitting the ground, isn’t the key to just start butter-side down? Another alternative: shorter tables.
I was puzzled by the “table” part of the report. I can’t remember ever dropping toast from a table, only from a kitchen counter (after buttering, obvs) or on the way out of the oven or toaster oven [in the probably-excepted-from-this-analysis case of cheese toast]. Once I’m eating toast, I ain’t droppin’ it.
In my case, at least, the kitchen counter is higher than a dining table, the toaster oven is even higher, and the oven is lower, yet the toast falls butter- or cheese-down improbably often. I always assumed it was something to do with the extra weight, lower friction of the slippery side, and a little incalculable bit of pure fuckery.
I was puzzled by the "table" part of the report. I can't remember ever dropping toast from a table, only from a kitchen counter (after buttering, obvs) or on the way out of the oven or toaster oven [in the probably-excepted-from-this-analysis case of cheese toast]. Once I'm eating toast, I ain't droppin' it.
In my case, at least, the kitchen counter is higher than a dining table, the toaster oven is even higher, and the oven is lower, yet the toast falls butter- or cheese-down improbably often. I always assumed it was something to do with the extra weight, lower friction of the slippery side, and a little incalculable bit of pure fuckery.
Buttered side up OR down…maybe just…don’t eat toast that you’ve dropped on the floor? I don’t know, I have a dog and two cats so eating floor things of any variety is ill-advised in my house. Also, if you drop me, I always land nutella side up. SELF PRESERVATION, Y’ALL.
Apparently other people’s floors are cleaner than my own, if they can reasonably argue with themselves whether to eat it or not. I can’t count how many times I have had to persuade guests not to eat something they’ve dropped on the floor, often resorting to “Please, please: I know how clean my floors aren’t.”
Yeah, the only time I will ever eat anything off my floor is if it’s a vitamin, because it’s hard enough that nothing is likely to stick to it and those suckers are too expensive to waste.
Eh, it’s a lot easier to clean up a couple toast crumbs than a buttery greasy smear on the floor. I’m not saying the five-second rule is forbidden in my house, but I would be way more annoyed about the cleaning implications of a butter-side-down spill.
Sod's Law is the British version of Murphy's Law. "Sod" is a mild swear word: "Sod you, mate!", for example, or "Sod off!"
Not directed at you, BTW, just used as examples.
Yeah I know what "sod" means, that's why it doesn't sound real.
I feel that this is the appropriate place for me to declare my hatred for the Big Bang Theory.
Apparently other people's floors are cleaner than my own, if they can reasonably argue with themselves whether to eat it or not. I can't count how many times I have had to persuade guests not to eat something they've dropped on the floor, often resorting to "Please, please: I know how clean my floors aren't."
Guys, Mythbusters did this in 2005. Ok, so they’re not scientists, but they came to pretty much the same conclusion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_%282005_…