You're holding that piece of toast. The butter is melting into the bread just the way you like it. But somehow it slips from your grip and away it goes, on a tumble toward the kitchen floor. On its way down, you have a fraction of a second to guess which side it's going to fall on. You hope it's not on the buttered side, but you're usually wrong. Why is that?
The answer isn't related to Murphy’s Law or to bad luck. It's physics.
Note how you hold the toast: at an edge, not at the middle. If you hold toast level with the ground with both hands and then release it, it will fall butter side up. But toast held at one end acts like a lever. When you lose the grip, the toast doesn’t fall straight but turns first. So the toast turns down first on the hinge of your thumb and forefinger's failing grip, and then completely slips from your hand and falls down, rotating as it goes. The force of rotation pushes the toast beyond a 90-degree angle. A piece of falling toast doesn’t have enough time to stabilize. After passing this partial rotation, the toast appears butter side slightly down and falls in that position, landing at about 180 degrees from its original position in your fingers. The inertia is not sufficient for the toast to keep rotating. It continues falling in butter-down position and lands that way. (The rotation effect is pronounced for elongated toast; it more often continues turning on its way down and lands butter side up.)
And that's the simple explanation. If you want a brief and more technical overview of the physics of falling toast, go here.
7 comments:
It is also affected by the speed of light.
As soon as that buttered toast hits the kitchen floor, and before I can retrieve it, my dog appears from nowhere and at the speed of light she snatches that slice of toast and darts away with it.
The effect described can be negated by the 5-second rule, which states any food that falls on the floor may be retrieved and consumed with no ill effects as long as it is done within 5 seconds of hitting the floor.
If you tape buttered toast -buttered side up - to the back of a cat and drop them do they just spin in mid air?
Didnt the Mythbusters bust this?
wow
I'm off to try the cat thing out the attic window!
Your dog waits til it hits the floor? Mine snatches it out of the air on its way down. And he licks up the crumbs.
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