For more than a century, people have grumbled that dropped bread always lands butter-side down and chalked it up to plain pessimism. When the BBC science show Q.E.D. tossed toast into the air in 1991, it landed butter-down only half the time \u2014 exactly what chance predicts.<\/p>\n
But the buttered toast phenomenon<\/a> is real when the toast slides off a table instead of getting flipped. Physicist Robert Matthews worked out why and won a 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for it: a slice pushed over a table edge starts to rotate, and an ordinary table gives it just enough falling time to complete about half a turn before it lands, buttered face down. Raise the table above ten feet and the toast finishes a full rotation and lands butter-up.<\/p>\n Matthews argued the outcome traces back to human height, which is itself capped by the strength of chemical bonds \u2014 a person tall enough to butter toast at a ten-foot counter would fracture their skull in any fall. The weight of the butter, mathematician Ian Stewart says, is “negligible.”<\/p>\n Previously:
\u2022 Five second rule conclusively debunked<\/a>
\u2022 Is the Five Second Rule real?<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For more than a century, people have grumbled that dropped bread always lands butter-side down and chalked it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":793113,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[33855,299,337011,337012,199,79],"class_list":["post-793112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-breakfast","tag-food","tag-ig-nobel-prize","tag-murphys-law","tag-physics","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=793112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793112\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/793113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=793112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=793112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=793112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}