why?

[EmmaBlu]

i just made some toast and i accidently dropped it....

all i wanna know is WHY does it always have to go butter side down all the time and make a bloody mess ?????????????????????

[Lisa]

because the buttered side is heavier, gravity & all that!!

[Maria]

I made a cheese toastie the other night.

 

Ended up just about to put the toastie in the bin abd keeping the wrapper for the cheese.

 

Untill I realised what I was doing, I saved my toastie.

 

[Guest Shenlong]

QUOTE (EBO @ Mar 2 2004, 15:21)

i just made some toast and i accidently dropped it.... all i wanna know is WHY does it always have to go butter side down all the time and make a bloody mess ?????????????????????

as a side note, people actaully ahev done scientific studies on this. if you twat it while it's still midair then it will most likely end up landing butter side up instead.

[EmmaBlu]

QUOTE (Shenlong @ Mar 2 2004, 15:25)

QUOTE (EBO @ Mar 2 2004, 15:21) i just made some toast and i accidently dropped it.... all i wanna know is WHY does it always have to go butter side down all the time and make a bloody mess ?????????????????????    as a side note, people actaully ahev done scientific studies on this. if you twat it while it's still midair then it will most likely end up landing butter side up instead. kool, will try it next time

[Lizard]

QUOTE (Shenlong @ Mar 2 2004, 15:25)

QUOTE (EBO @ Mar 2 2004, 15:21) i just made some toast and i accidently dropped it.... all i wanna know is WHY does it always have to go butter side down all the time and make a bloody mess ?????????????????????    as a side note, people actaully ahev done scientific studies on this. if you twat it while it's still midair then it will most likely end up landing butter side up instead. OR...since toast always lands butter-side down and cats always land on their feet, get some freshly buttered toast and sellotape it to a cats back then drop them...watch in amazement as they both hover an inch or so off the ground spinning around madly, desperately trying to land but not being able to because of the opposing laws of nature!

[Trouble]

naaaa thats just confusing dont eat toast

 

eat toasties all the goodness is in the middle so even if u drop it its all good cos its protected by the bread

 

 

 

mmmmmmmm bean toasties

[EmmaBlu]

cheers for the advice guys xxxxxxxx

[russelldust]

Toast, the universe and you

This story appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail, Saturday Oct. 28, 1995, under the headline ''The physics of why toast falls upside down.'' I love stories that find links between the mundane and the magnificent. Don't you? (Robert Matthews, by the way, has joined the ranks of the ungodly and is now a science journalist himself at one of the London dailies.)

 

 

 

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

In those pre-coffee morning moments when your toast starts to slide off an incautiously tilted plate, you know what's going to happen. Damn! Butter-side down again. Sometimes it seems as if the whole universe is against you.

Well, actually, that's right. The whole universe is against you -- at least as far as tumbling toast is concerned. That's the considered scientific opinion of Robert Matthews, a mathematician at the University of Aston in Birmingham, England. Turns out, Prof. Matthews says, that toast lands butter-side down because of some fundamental properties of matter -- properties that were established in the first few split seconds of the Big Bang.

 

In other words, Prof. Matthews says, ''toast falling off the breakfast table lands butter-side down because the universe is made that way.'' Murphy's Law rules, okay?

 

We all know that toast lands messy side down -- and you'll probably spill your coffee an instant later, too, if you don't stub your toe into the bargain -- but the orthodox scientific view has been that, really, toast falls both ways and we just forget the times it didn't stain the carpet. In fact, Prof. Matthews pointed out in a paper this summer in the European Journal of Physics, if you just throw toast in the air -- as some experimenters have done -- it does fall pretty randomly.

 

Trouble is, that's not what happens to most people's toast. It either slides off a tilted plate or is knocked horizontally off the table (by a hand reaching too quickly for the coffee jug, for example.) ``Carelessly hurling toast randomly into the air,'' Prof. Matthews writes, is not a very good model of the real world of breakfast tables.

 

So he created a better model . He had noticed that whenever he knocked a paperback off his desk, it landed upside down. The connection to toast was obvious. What happens when toast tumbles or books plummet, Prof. Matthews found, is that gravity pulls the unsupported edge, creating a spin. When he calculated the rate of spin for toast, it turned out to be slow -- too slow to get the butter-side up again before the toast hit the floor.

 

Given that gravity is pretty constant, only two factors really affect the toast's final position -- the size of the toast and the height from which it dropped. In the long run, of course, both of those are determined by what size we are -- and that, it turns out, depends very strongly on some fundamental constants.

 

In 1980, the Harvard physicist William Press pointed out that, if humans were very tall, they'd be in danger of a deadly head injury every time they fell over; the acceleration of gravity would give their skulls such high energy that smacking the ground would rupture the chemical bonds that hold the bones together. As it is, we just get a sore noggin.

 

So Prof. Matthews did some figuring and came up with a maximum height for people of about three metres. A table for such tall creatures would have a height of about 1.5 metres -- high, but still not high enough for the toast to make a complete turn.

 

The cosmic catch is this: In Prof. Matthews' formula for the maximum height, three basic constants appear. The first is the so-called gravitational constant, the second governs the strength of the chemical bonds in bone and the third dictates the size of the atoms in the body. The values of all three were set, according to modern physical theory, just split-seconds after the Big Bang. Murphy's law (Toast Version) is built into the universe.

 

Toast trauma is not inevitable, of course. One benefit of knowing why and something happens is that you can sometimes prevent it. I suggested to Prof. Matthews that a simple remedy for the perversity of the universe would be to put the toast on the plate with the butter-side already down. Then if it fell -- hey, no problem. It would land butter-side up.

 

True enough, he said, but there are less messy answers. For instance, if the toast is sliding off a plate, quickly pull the plate down and away. Or, if you've knocked your toast horizontally off the table, try to give it another swift horizontal swat. In both cases, if you're deft enough, you'll prevent the full spin from developing and the toast will land safely.

 

Prof. Matthews concludes his paper by quoting Einstein's famous dictum that God may be subtle, but He is not malicious. ``That may be so,'' Prof. Matthews writes wryly, ''but His influence on falling toast clearly leaves much to be desired.''.

 

This is satisfying science, in a way that Grand Unified Theories are not. It has no great industrial application nor indeed any real use at all. It does not open the door to wide-ranging new scientific visions. It is satisfying because it lays bare the connection between what Prof. Matthews calls ''the familiar and the fundamental.'' The world is an ordered place and even Murphy's Law -- that age-old epitome of cussedness -- has a rational explanation.

 

So, when your toast messes the floor, take what comfort there may be in realizing that the universe is unfolding -- not as it should -- but as it must.

 

 

[Bungle]

QUOTE (Lizard @ Mar 2 2004, 15:40)

OR...since toast always lands butter-side down and cats always land on their feet, get some freshly buttered toast and sellotape it to a cats back then drop them...watch in amazement as they both hover an inch or so off the ground spinning around madly, desperately trying to land but not being able to because of the opposing laws of nature!

I was going to say that!

[Tresh]

Put it down to the Law of Sod.

[Bushy]

QUOTE (EBO @ Mar 2 2004, 15:21)

i just made some toast and i accidently dropped it.... all i wanna know is WHY does it always have to go butter side down all the time and make a bloody mess ?????????????????????

weight ratios

[Lizard]

QUOTE (Bungle @ Mar 2 2004, 19:49)

QUOTE (Lizard @ Mar 2 2004, 15:40) OR...since toast always lands butter-side down and cats always land on their feet, get some freshly buttered toast and sellotape it to a cats back then drop them...watch in amazement as they both hover an inch or so off the ground spinning around madly, desperately trying to land but not being able to because of the opposing laws of nature! I was going to say that! It's a good one isn't it

[Ginge]

I dont believe all that "the butter side is heavier" rubbish.

 

Surely spreading something on anything it will just shift the center of gravity.

 

People say it "always" lands butter side down because they moan about it when it does therefore remembering it more than when it lands butter side up.

 

Its more of a 50/50 thing.