The English physicist Robert Matthews was laureated with the 1996 Ignobel Physics Award for explaining Murphy’s law of the toast, that is, why a toast always tends to fall with the side of the butter down.
The Briton was born in the city of Carshalton, south of London and graduated in physics from the University of Oxford in 1991. He worked as a scientific dissemination journalist and currently joined the staff of Aston University, located in Birmingham, Midwest England.
In his work, Matthews used mathematics and physics to create an equation that explained Murphy’s law of the toast, which is named because it is an arm of Murphy’s famous law, which says everything that can go wrong will go wrong.
“I was able to demonstrate that typical pieces of toast falling from typical tables or dishes will begin to spin around the edge. The problem is that the rotation rate is not fast enough to bring the side of the butter up before it reaches the floor,” Matthews explained in an exclusive interview with CNN .
“If the toast were a very different size, it would turn at a different rate, or if the table had a different height, it would have more time to return completely with the butter side up.”
He also explained that the result does not depend on the weight of the stuffing or the density of bread, as the toast falls into free fall and, as Albert Einstein explained in his gravity theory, its weight is negligible.
More recently, he was invited by Enterogermina to make the way back and create a toast that always falls upwards. As the table must be 3 meters high for a toast to complete the turn, the physique decided to test different toast formats.
The solution was to choose a small, slightly lighter toast with a hole in the edge to prevent the toast from rotating when it reaches the edge of the surface.
Watch the video that explains the project:
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This content was originally published in who is Robert Matthews, a physicist who unveiled the Murphy of Torrada law on CNN Brazil.
Source: CNN Brasil
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