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Why buttered toast lands butter-side down
Boing Boing • • science
Key Points:
- The common belief that dropped bread always lands butter-side down is mostly due to pessimism, as experiments show it lands butter-side down about half the time when tossed in the air.
- Physicist Robert Matthews demonstrated that when toast slides off a table, it tends to land butter-side down because the toast rotates just enough during the fall to complete about half a turn.
- Matthews won a 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for explaining this phenomenon, noting that the height of ordinary tables allows the toast to rotate to butter-side down before hitting the floor.
- Raising the table height above ten feet would allow the toast to complete a full rotation and land butter-side up, but human height and safety limits prevent such scenarios.
- The added weight of the butter on the toast is negligible and does not significantly affect the rotation or landing orientation.
