Category: Observations

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Coffee cup science General Home experiments Observations Science history

Telling the time with an Aeropress?

Aeropress bloom, coffee in an Aeropress
The first stage of making coffee with an Aeropress is to immerse the coffee grind in the water. Here, the plunger is at the bottom of the coffee.

On occasion, it takes a change in our routine for us to re-see our world in a slightly different way. And so it was that when there was an opportunity to borrow an Aeropress together with a hand grinder, I jumped at it. Each morning presented a meditative time for grinding the beans before the ritual of preparing the coffee by a different brew method. Each day became an opportunity to think about something new.

Perhaps it is not as immediately eye catching as the method of a slow pour of water from a swan necked kettle of a V60, and yet making coffee using the Aeropress offers a tremendously rich set of connections that we could ponder and contemplate if we would but notice them. And it starts with the seal. For those who may not be familiar with the Aeropress, a cylindrical ‘plunger’ with a seal tightly fits into a plastic cylinder (brew guide here). The first stage of making a coffee with the Aeropress is to use the cylinder to brew an ‘immersion’ type coffee, exactly as with the French Press (but here, the plunger is on the floor of the coffee maker). Then, after screwing a filter paper and plastic colander to the top of the cylinder and leaving the coffee to brew for a certain amount of time, the whole system is ‘inverted’ onto a mug where some coffee drips through the filter before the rest is forced out using the plunger to push the liquid through the coffee grind.

clepsydra creative commons license British Museum
A 4th century BC Ptolemaic clepsydra in the British Museum collection. Image © Trustees of the British Museum

Immediately perhaps your mind could jump to water clocks where water was allowed to drip out of two holes at the bottom of a device at a rate that allowed people to time certain intervals. It is even suggested that Galileo used such a “clepsydra” to time falling bodies (though I prefer the idea that he sang in order to time his pendulums). With many holes in the bottom of the device and an uneven coffee grind through which the water (coffee) flows, the Aeropress is perhaps not the best clock available to us now. However there is another connection between the Aeropress and the clepsydra that would take us to a whole new area of physics and speculation.

When the medieval thinker Adelard of Bath was considering the issue of whether nature could sustain a vacuum, he thought about the issue of the clepsydra¹. With two holes at the bottom and holes at the top for air, the clepsydra would drip the water through the clock at an even rate. Unless of course the holes at the top were blocked, in which case the water stopped dripping, (a similar thing can be observed when sealing the top of a straw). What kept the water in the jar when the top hole was blocked? What kept it from following its natural path of flowing downwards? (gravity was not understood at that point either). Adelard argued that it was not ‘magic’ that kept the water in when no air could go through, something else was at work.

What could be the explanation? Adelard argued that the universe was full of the four elements (air, water, fire, earth) which are “so closely bound together by natural affection, that just as none of them would exist without the other, so no place is empty of them. Hence it happens, that as soon as one of them leaves its position, another immediately takes its place… When, therefore, the entrance is closed to that which is to come in, it will be all in vain that you open an exit for the water, unless you give an entrance to the air….”²

inverted Aeropress and coffee stain
The Aeropress inverted onto a coffee cup before the plunger is pushed down. Complete with coffee stain behind the cup where the inversion process went awry.

Now, we would argue that whether the water flows down and out of the Aeropress, or not, depends on the balance of forces pushing the water down and those pushing it up. The forces pushing the water down and out of the clepsydra, or Aeropress, are gravity and the air pressure above the water in the cylinder. Pushing it up, it is only the air pressure from below. Ordinarily, the air pressure above and that below the water in the Aeropress are quite similar, gravity wins the tug of war and the water flows out. In an enclosed system however (if the holes at the top are blocked), were the water to flow out of the bottom, the air pressure above the coffee space would reduce. This makes sense because, if no new air gets in, the same amount of air that we had before now occupies a larger volume as the water has left it, the pressure exerted by that air will have to be less than before. A reduced air pressure means a reduced force on the water pushing it down through the filter and so the force pushing the water down can now be perfectly balanced by the force (from the surrounding air) pushing the water up: the water remains in the Aeropress. The only way we get the coffee out is to change the balance of forces on the water which means pushing down the plunger.

But perhaps it is worth stepping back and imagining what the consequences could be of having the idea that the universe was just full of something that had to be continuous. You may find it quite reasonable for example to consider that vortices would form behind and around the planets as they travelled in their circular orbits through this ‘something’*. Such vortices could explain some of the effects of gravity that we observe and so there would perhaps be no urgency to develop a gravitational theory such as the one we have. There would be other consequences, the world of vacuum physics and consequently of electronics would be significantly set back. In his lecture for the Carl Sagan Prize for Excellence in Public Communication in Planetary Science, The Director of the Vatican Observatory, Br Guy Consolmagno SJ explored previous scientific ideas that were almost right, which “is to say wrong” (You can see his lecture “Discarded Worlds: Astronomical Worlds that were almost correct” here) If it is true that so many scientific theories lasted so long (because they were almost correct) but were in fact wrong, how many of our scientific ideas today are ‘almost correct’ too?

It makes you wonder how our preconceptions of the world affect our ability to investigate it. And for that matter, how our ability to contemplate the world is affected by our practise of doing so. They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For that to be true, the beholder has to open their eyes, look, contemplate and be prepared to be shown wrong in their preconceptions.

What connections do you make to your coffee brew each morning? I’d love to know, here in the comments, on Twitter or over on Facebook.

 

* Does a connection between this and stirring your freshly brewed Aeropress coffee with a teaspoon trailing vortices stretch the connectivity a bit too far?

¹ “Much Ado about Nothing: Theories of space and vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution”, Edward Grant, Cambridge University Press, (1981)

² Quoted from Adelard of Bath’s “Quaestiones Naturales” taken from Much Ado about nothing, page 67.

Categories
Coffee review Coffee Roasters Observations

Connectivity at Populus, Singapore

Inside Populus
The cool interior of Populus

A friend recommended that we try a café in her neighbourhood near Outram, in Singapore. So, with some time to spare we walked up the hill and into the welcoming air conditioning of The Populus Cafe in Neil Road. The coffee is roasted by 2º North and there is an extensive menu of both coffee based drinks and a seasonal filter selection. There was also a range of iced drinks on the menu which in the Singapore heat were tempting, but I opted for the 6oz Long Black. Given more time, or a second visit, I would certainly try the filter, but this time an appointment across the island was calling. There seemed too to be a very good lunch selection on the menu, but again, the lunch appointment elsewhere meant that it was just the 6oz long black that day.

It should be possible to take some time back from a busy schedule full of appointments and concerns and sit back and ponder the connections in any café. Having run from one set of concerns and soon to have to go off to another, would this be possible in 30ºC+ heat? The comfortable space of Populus provided a perfect place to test this question. Sitting back while sipping my coffee, the first thing that struck me was the wood, arranged in different geometrical patterns on the walls. The floors too were decorated with hexagonal stone tiles while the door was glass. There was a different pattern on the door, but what was it? Staring at it for a while, I thought about the schematics you sometimes see for a connected world, each of us a point connected to the others (how true is it that we are all 6 hand shakes away from everyone else?). Maybe this fitted with the name of the café? My companion in these reviews instead thought of crystals and the way that crystal structures are represented with lines between the atoms. While loading the photograph of the door onto the website, I saw a pattern of flowers. It seems that the pattern on the door formed and reformed with each new view.

door, Populus
Looking through the door of Populus. What patterns do you see?

Then there was the cup. A black coffee in a black cup, with umbral and penumbral shadows (as pointed out by @Bob_MatPhys on Twitter). A few years ago there was great excitement about a new material that had been made to be blacker than any known material. The substance used a coating of carbon nanowires (of just 20nm diameter which is about 1/1000 the size of a grain of espresso grind) to absorb light across the visible, ultra-violet and infrared spectrum. And just as nano-structuring a material helps it to appear the ‘blackest’ object ever, so changing the structure of a material can make it invisible to other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum such as microwaves. Quite why various defence companies and governments would invest so much into this research I will leave for your imagination (it is not to avoid heating soup). A more peaceful and beautiful side of the effect of nanostructure on optical properties is the way that the feathers of a peacock have a striking green-blue hue. It is another example of light interacting with a structure and so producing different optical effects; all is not as it appears.

coffee cup Populus
A black coffee in a black coffee cup. But what does black mean? And is something that is transparent always so?

And the fact that all is not as it appears gives another connection to the Populus cup. For although it seemed quite black to my eyes, it was clearly shining in the infra-red. The hot coffee inside was radiating through the cup and onto my hands. Which could prompt us to consider what ‘black’ really means? And for that matter, what about transparent? Just as ‘black’ only absorbs light over a certain set of frequencies, so transparent only lets light through over certain frequencies. The door that we can see through with our eyes may be opaque to a different frequency range that we cannot see. Just over two hundred years ago Carl Wilhelm Scheele deduced the presence of the infrared by contemplating how his stove heated him in the winter. Although he could not see them, the ‘heat rays’ seemed to come straight towards him and yet did not cause a candle flame to flicker, clearly the heat was ‘radiating’ like light rather than travelling like a breeze on the air.

The knowledge that structure, as well as pigment, provides the colour to our world, or that what is transparent at some frequencies may be opaque to others, these things give us plenty to think about, scientifically and perhaps more philosophically, while enjoying our black coffee. Which shows that even ten minutes spent sitting with your coffee can result in a series of thought connections that you may not have enjoyed had you rushed from appointment to appointment while checking your smartphone. That we could all enjoy a good ten minutes (or more) in the Populus Cafe!

The Populus Cafe is at 146 Neil Road, Singapore 088875

Categories
Observations slow

Pondering at Populus

It’s been a bit of a slow start to January, with no post since 2018, sorry!

But I wanted to share a couple of images from the next cafe-physics review. Perhaps you could place yourself in a comfortable chair in a café called “Populus”. Gazing out of the café, the front door looks like this:

door, Populus
A decorated door, but what connections do you make?

While looking inside the café, you are greeted with these patterns on the wall.

Inside Populus
Inside Populus.

What strikes you? What do you think about? I think there are a number of avenues for possible thought trains. Where would your thoughts go if you just sat here in Populus and pondered?

 

 

 

Categories
General Home experiments Observations slow Tea

Corona gazing in cafes

interference patterns on coffee
There are many ways in which rainbows of colour are produced as light interacts with our coffee or in a cafe. Looking around yourself now, how many do you see? What physics underlies each?

As the nights grow longer and the days colder, we notice that windows steam up as the water vapour in the café condenses onto the cooler glass. Perhaps we see a similar thing on our glasses while we are drinking tea or on the windows of a bus. Initially we perhaps become frustrated at our inability to see what is going on outside but then we notice the colourful patterns around the lights of passing cars and of street lights. Haloes of coloured light around a central bright spot. What does this tell us and where else can we see it, either in a café or in life generally?

On a window pane, a large number of small droplets of water have condensed into what appears to us as a fog on the glass. As the light shines through from the car headlights, each droplet acts as an obstacle to the light and so bends it. You could see a similar effect with the waves on the sea going around stones or perhaps if you brew a large cup of coffee with the surface waves going around a spoon (let me know if you manage to see this bending in a coffee cup). The amount that the light bends is dependent on the wavelength of the light (look carefully at the waves going around obstacles in ponds to see this) and so different wavelengths (different colours) get bent by different amounts and interfere with each other at different points – a spectrum is produced. It is a phenomenon known as diffraction.

Not all beans are equal! How could you quickly distinguish between arabica and robusta beans?

This phenomenon means that we have a way of separating the frequencies (or wavelengths) of light. And so this means that we have a way of measuring the chemical composition of some substances as different chemicals absorb different frequencies and so have ‘fingerprints’ in the light they scatter. By passing the light scattered from a substance (such as arabica coffee beans compared to robusta) through a diffraction grating (which is an obstacle with a pattern of fixed size), we can separate the frequencies being scattered and see if any of them are ‘missing’ (ie. they have been absorbed by the material we’re studying). It would be  a bit like looking at that rainbow pattern in the café window and not seeing blue, its absence tells you something. This is one of the ways that robusta beans can be quickly found if they have been substituted for arabica beans in coffee trading.

Coffee Corona
Look carefully: Sometimes you can infer the existence of a thin (white) mist over your coffee by the corona pattern around reflected light fittings.

But it is not just its technological aspect that has interest for us surely? When gazing at the moon on a misty evening, the halo around the moon suggests the clouds between us and it. It is something that poets have remarked upon to evoke atmosphere, it is something that we can gaze at as we imagine the giant café window of our atmosphere. But the size, and distinctness of the lunar corona actually give us clues about the droplets making up the cloud. And then we look closer to home and to our own coffee and we see the same diffraction pattern again looking back at us from our coffee’s surface. Occasionally it is possible to see haloes on the coffee surface around the reflection of overhead lights in the café. A coffee corona! This reveals to us the fact that there are droplets of water above the surface of our coffee; an extra layer of hovering droplets. Something that we can sometimes see more directly in the dancing white mists.

Diffraction is a beautiful phenomenon that allows us to gaze and to contemplate how much we are able to deduce and how much we have yet to understand. How atmospheric our coffees and cafés are and the journey of understanding that we have taken to get to this point. Coffee gazing is a hobby that should be taken up by far more of us.

Bean Thinking noticing afternoons are going to start in London in early 2019. To find out more information, sign up to the Bean Thinking events list here:

Please enter your email address here if you would like to hear about future Bean Thinking events.

 

Categories
Coffee review General Home experiments Observations Science history slow Tea

Noticing at Artisan, Ealing

coffee Artisan Ealing
A good coffee is a solid foundation for any afternoon’s noticing.

A cafe-physics review with a difference. In that, it’s not so much a review as an invitation. What do you notice in a café?

Last week, I had the opportunity to try Artisan’s Ealing branch. Although I had found a lot to notice on my previous visit to the East Sheen branch, I had a very specific reason for visiting the Ealing location of this small chain of four cafés. The coffee (espresso) was reliably good. Smooth and drinkable in a friendly atmosphere. Just as with the café in East Sheen, there were a good selection of edibles at the counter and plenty to notice. The light shades were immediately outstanding as something to notice while a framed ‘hole in the wall’ provided a conversation point. The café was very busy and while there was plenty of seating with many tables, we were still lucky to have got a table for two near the back. Behind us there was a lesson going on in the coffee school while on the wall was the calendar for the space booking downstairs. And it was this that I had come here for.

A couple of months ago, Artisan announced that this space would be available to rent to provide a friendly space (with coffee) for the meetings of local small businesses or charities. This stayed in the back of my mind for a while as it came about at roughly the same time as an idea for Bean Thinking.

Lampshades at Artisan Ealing
First the obvious. Immediately striking, these lampshades could provide several avenues for thought.

There are a couple of us who are interested in meeting, about once a month, to discuss science. As ‘science’ is quite a big subject, we thought we would limit it to science that is associated with coffee or with the café at which we are meeting. Perhaps readers of this website may realise that this is not such a restriction, it is quite easy to connect coffee to the cosmic microwave background radiation of the Universe or to chromatography and analytical chemistry. If we were to meet in a location such as Artisan, there should be plenty more food for thoughts. The lampshades prompted me to consider what made substances opaque or transparent? Where is the link to coffee and methods for measuring the coffee extraction? The hole in the wall suggested thoughts about the algorithms behind cash machines. I’m sure that there is plenty more to notice if we take the time to see it.

And so this is an invitation. Would you like to join us in exploring what we each notice about the science of our surroundings? The plan would be to meet once a month, probably starting late January 2019 or early February (date and location to be confirmed). An afternoon on the weekend is probably better than an evening and we’d probably stay for an hour or two. You do not have to be a practising scientist to come along indeed, it would be great if we could have people from a variety of walks of life. The idea is not (necessarily) to answer scientific questions that we each may have but instead to explore the science behind the questions, to find the connections that form our ideas of the universe. To really notice our surroundings and our coffees (tea drinkers would also be welcome). As a consequence of this, mobile phones/laptops etc. will be discouraged during the afternoon. We’d like to notice things around us and not be distracted by what a search engine suggests about it; if we think a search engine could help us, we’ll use it after we’ve left and come back the following month to discuss the issues further. So, if you are curious, would like to explore what you notice and can tolerate keeping your phone on silent and in your pocket for an afternoon, please do come along, it would be great to meet some of you.

menus and lampshades in Artisan
You may like to look more closely at this photo. How are the menus supported? What does that tell us about the history of science?

In order to understand whether there would be any interest in this idea and to hear your input about the format, content, location, time etc. I have set up a mailing list for these cafe-science-spaces. Please do sign up to the mailing list to hear the latest announcements concerning these events and also to email me back to contribute your opinion. You can sign up to the mailing list using the sign up form below. Alternatively, if you don’t want to sign up to the mailing list but do want to hear more, I will be advertising the events on Twitter and Facebook so please do feel free to follow me there.

 

Please enter your email address here if you would like to hear about future Bean Thinking events.

 

Categories
Coffee review Observations Science history Sustainability/environmental Tea

A post in need of a Curator(s) Coffee, Fitzrovia

espresso Curators
A deliciously intense and fruity espresso from the ‘specials’ menu at Curators Coffee.

Curators Coffee in Margaret St in Fitzrovia has been there for years. A great location just off of Oxford St, with plenty of seating and good coffee, and so it is perfect to pop into, unless you are like me and avoid the Oxford St area as much as possible. Which perhaps explains the rarity of my visits. I first popped into Curators Coffee a couple of years back (before the laws on allergen information came in) when I remember enjoying a lovely long black but couldn’t have a cake because the people behind the counter that day couldn’t tell me which (if any) cakes contained nuts. At the time, I sat upstairs and noticed the graphene type arrangement of hexagons around the back of the space and the Bramah’s 300 years of coffee makers book in a rack at the back. I had wanted to return to properly cafe-physics review the place at a later date (and try the cake) but circumstances (and Oxford St avoidance) meant that I never got round to it. Until very recently.

This time, I noticed that there were three single origin coffees available to try as espresso. Glancing at the tasting notes it was a fairly quick decision: “chocolate”. And although this time I had just had lunch and so passed on the cake, it appears that the espresso choices regularly rotate, offering an incentive to come back again and try something new. Although the café is quite large, with plenty of seating, it seems that it is also very popular. And so there were no spaces remaining upstairs. Fortunately, there were more seats downstairs and so, taking our table number with us, we made our way down the stairs and found a table at the window, as if it was waiting for us.

UFO in Curators Coffee Fitzrovia
A UFO reflected in the window? Why? What? Why (again)? It is small details such as this that reward you as you put down your smart phone and notice your surroundings.

Perhaps it is obvious that a café called Curators should have art work adorning the walls. That, and the spotlights that highlighted the work immediately caught our interest, (although it was odd to see that one of the rows of spotlights was almost devoid of bulbs). The exhibition downstairs seemed to have a tilt towards street art and a couple of decorated aerosol cans were on the windowsill priced at £15 each. Was this the time to consider why an aerosol gets cooler as you spray the walls with it?

Outside the window, a staircase leading up to the street outside had railings in straight lines leading up towards a blue sky. Inside, a space craft was reflected in the window.

Indeed, on checking again, there was a spacecraft, like a cartoon of a stereotypical little UFO, drawn onto the wall behind my accomplice’s head and reflected in the window next to it. What could it mean? Regardless of whether some UFO incidents are associated with visitors from other planets, there are a large number of scientific thought trains we can take when considering a UFO reflected in a window. To start with, how likely is it that we are alone in the universe or that there are many other intelligent life forms in other planetary systems?

The question has been answered on the basis of probability for many years. But recently, we have been finding more planets orbiting stars and crucially, more planets that are in the ‘habitable’ zone around other stars. Assuming that life elsewhere needs similar conditions to the earth’s in order to thrive, the idea of life elsewhere is becoming increasingly real.

canali Curators Coffee
If you see straight lines such as this, it is fairly sensible to infer that they were built by an intelligent life-form. Can you see canals on Mars?

Closer to home, there were even suggestions that Mars may support flowing water, thought to be a host for bacteria based life. And although these interpretations of the flow patterns observed on the Martian surface have more recently been contested (could they instead be flowing sand?), we continue to send probes (such as the Insight probe that landed recently) to the red planet to investigate its geology. Did Mars once host life?  Mars of course has a resonance in science fiction for being the planet hosting extra-terrestrial life. HG Wells imagined the Martians landing just south of London, and eventually being killed off by exposure to bacteria on earth that they had not experienced in their Martian habitat. Could life on Mars suggest a (tenuous) further link to this café on Margaret St?

Perhaps one reason that people started to imagine (intelligent) life on Mars came about because of an interesting mistranslation of an astronomical observation. While gazing at Mars in 1877, Schiaparelli noted ‘canali’ on the Martian surface. The correct translation of this in this context into English is “channels” but what the observation came to be known as was “canals”. Canals imply an intelligent builder, and hence life on Mars. Later observers also saw these ‘canals’ and a popular myth was born. It is a useful lesson for us all, sometimes how we see something can be influenced by the language we use to describe it.

soya hot chocolate, Curators
We photograph our coffee, and share it with our online friends. But would putting down our phone in a cafe be worth something for the planet as well as for ourselves? How many batteries do we need?

And then one final thought train, prompted by photographing the cafe with my mobile phone. The whole probability argument rests on two assumptions. The first is that there are other planetary systems (which we are finding). The second is that life is fairly easy to start, or at least, that the chances of producing life are not restricted to one planet a short distance away from the Sun; we are not unique. As yet we don’t know whether this assumption is justified but discoveries such as the deep sea hydrothermal vents challenge our preconceptions about the requirements for life and suggest that life could start more than once, and so could very well start on other planets, not just ours. In these vents, bacteria are known to convert what we think of as toxic chemicals into energy in a process known as chemosynthesis without the need of sunlight or other ingredients that we had thought essential to life. Could similar hydrothermal vents on other planets host new life forms?

And in a related way, what is going on with these vents? Is new life being created even now in the deep sea? In which case, what do we think about deep sea mining? If our aim is to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by using more re-usable objects and renewable energy sources, we will require more batteries and batteries require (among other things) cobalt. If we are all to keep using mobile phones to photograph cafés, we too need the batteries which rely on these elements. A number of companies have realised that there is a vast untapped resource under the sea if only we could dredge it up. This may be easier or ultimately cheaper than recycling the old batteries. It may destroy a few hydrothermal vents or stir up the sea bed but what concern is that to us if we can gain access to more cobalt to allow us to have more batteries to allow us to all be ‘greener’.

Indeed, of what concern is that to us?

Curators Coffee is at 51 Margaret St, W1W 8SG

Categories
Observations Science history Tea

The universe and a coffee cup

a heat sensitive coffee mug
Now you see it….

Ordinarily, this week would be the turn of a cafe-physics review but circumstances have meant that this will be postponed by one week, sorry. So instead, a question. How does your coffee cup resemble the universe?

A few years ago, I was given a heat changing mug that revealed the constellations when the coffee within it was hot (and went black as the coffee was finished/went cold). Although this is not the way that the universe resembles a coffee mug, the science behind these mugs is quite interesting and they do provide a clue to the connection. The answer (or an answer, you may think of more) is in the way that the mug emits heat.

On a cold day with a hot coffee, I can be fairly sure that by putting my hands quite close but not touching the cup, I can feel the radiated warmth. Infrared waves helping prevent my fingers from becoming numb. Although there is air around the cup (even physicists don’t drink coffee in a vacuum) and so there will be heat transferred from the cup to my hands via conduction and convection, a large amount of the heat my hands receive will be radiated. It was by watching a candle flame between himself and a stove that Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742-1786) inferred the presence of the infrared. For a coffee temperature of 60ºC (333 Kelvin), the cup would emit a range of light with a peak in intensity at a wavelength in the infrared of around 8.5 μm, about the length of a grain of espresso grind. The way that objects radiate heat is well known. Called a “black body spectrum”, all things radiate a spectrum that can be approximated to it, whether the object is a coffee cup or the universe, the difference is over what frequency range (or wavelength) the object radiates and where in the spectrum the light intensity peaks.

cold mug
Now you don’t.
The same cup as above but photographed when it is at room temperature not when it contains hot liquid.

Coffee emits light (in the infrared) at 8.5 μm because it is about 60ºC. A ‘red hot’ iron rod, still emits light in a spectrum that peaks in the infrared but appears more red than my coffee cup because the peak in the radiated intensity has decreased closer to the red region of the visible spectrum. The universe emits radiation over the same sort of blackbody curve but the spectrum emitted by the universe peaks at a wavelength of around 2cm, much longer than the coffee cup and well beyond the infrared. In fact, the universe is emitting light in the microwave region. The longer wavelength means that the universe is a lot colder than a cup of coffee. About 330º cooler in fact because the temperature of the universe is a chilly 2.7K (or approximately -270ºC).

The presence of this microwave ‘background’ was first detected in the 1960s. Further experiments in the 1990s with the COBE satellite and more recently with the Planck satellite have confirmed the almost perfect uniformity of the blackbody spectrum. No matter which direction you turn your microwave antennae to, you pick up the same background spectrum, peaking at about 2cm, all around the universe. This means that the background temperature of the universe is the same in all directions that we look, it is uniform. Indeed, it took until the sensitivity of the Planck satellite and more recently the WMAP data to show that the universe had any variation at all. And when it was revealed, it was a difference of about one part in a million. If we compare this to our coffee we can see from the lines of light that dance on the bottom of a tea cup that there is significant temperature variation within the cup. Even a difference of one degree would lead to a shift in the blackbody spectrum of the coffee cup by a few parts in a thousand: the background temperature of the universe is far more uniform than the temperature of your cup of coffee in fact the shift seems to be of the order of 0.0002º.

But, apart from an interesting curiosity why would we want to measure the temperature of the universe or know the uniformity of a cup of coffee? One reason is that knowing the current temperature and its likely cooling mechanism, means that we can calculate how long the universe, or coffee, has been cooling. If I were to drink a cup of coffee that was cooler than about 60ºC I would know that either it has been prepared much earlier and left on the counter top or that it had been prepared using water below the optimum brewing temperature. If I note from the lines of light crossing the bottom of the cup that there is a lot of convection going on in my tea cup with cells of different temperature, I could think that it is either a very cold day or that I didn’t warm the cup before I poured the coffee or tea into it.

NASA image CMB
There is even more information in the background if we start to look at the polarisation of the microwaves. The Cosmic Microwave Background showing the minute temperature fluctuations and polarisation directions. Image credit ESA/Planck Collaboration

Knowing the temperature of the universe allows us to check theories of how the universe formed (and therefore how it cools) by calculating its age and seeing if this matches with the age deduced by other means (by looking at the oldest star clusters for example). While looking at the minute temperature variations across the universe is also a test of the theories of the universe’s formation.

There are clearly differences between the universe and a mug of coffee, even a mug that shows the constellations of the stars, not least the fact that the coffee cools into the universe but the universe’s cooling is different having nothing to cool into. Nonetheless, it is remarkable that the same physical laws and mathematics that describes your cooling coffee cup can be used to describe our entire universe. So sit back, take a deep breath, and enjoy the universe through your coffee cup.

 

Categories
Home experiments Observations Science history

21 years of the coffee stain

dried coffee stains, alcohol and coffee
Happy 21st birthday to the coffee stain. But there is still much for us to learn 21 years after the first paper on the coffee stain was published.

On the 23rd October, 1997, a paper was published in the journal Nature titled “Capillary flow as the cause of ring stains from dried liquid drops.” The title is in the dry style that scientific papers can be written. An alternative title could have been “How coffee stains form”*. Perhaps you would think, surely someone had known how coffee stains formed before 1997? And maybe you would go on to think: certainly 21 years later in 2018, we’d know all there was to know about the coffee stain? I hope that readers of Bean Thinking would not think “who cares about coffee stains?”, but I wonder whether it was the combination of disinterest and assuming that someone somewhere surely knew how they formed that meant it took until 1997 for anyone to ask the question: well how do they form?

Coffee is a very popular drink among scientists, though even this does not explain how popular this paper has become. A paper’s popularity can be measured in ‘number of citations’ which tells you how many times other authors have found this piece of work important enough to reference it in their own published paper. As of early November 2018, this paper has been cited nearly 3300 times. Why? Well, there seem to be at least two reasons. Firstly, it turns out that the coffee stain effect is of enormous technological relevance; it may even have been used in the manufacture of the device you are using to read this website. But secondly even now, 21 years later, we still don’t understand what is going on, there is still much to learn and some of it is some very subtle and very beautiful physics.

the droplets ready to dry
What happens when you form coffee stains using drops containing two liquids (alcohol and water) compared to just one (water)?

Very recently for example, a new paper was published in Physical Review Letters. This one was titled “Density-driven flows in evaporating binary liquid droplets“. Another exciting title, another time we’ll retitle it for the purposes of this post: “what happens when you mix alcohol with a coffee type suspension, dry it at different angles and film it drying.” Arguably this time the given title is more succinct. Why does it make a difference if you add alcohol to your coffee rather than just drink it straight (the coffee, not the alcohol)? And what happens to the resulting coffee stain?

Maybe of an evening you’ve been relaxing with a glass of wine, or something stronger, and noticed the “legs” rising up the glass. Their formation and appearance is due to the differing surface tensions between alcohol and water and the fact that alcohol evaporates more easily than water, you can read more about that effect here. The point is that because of the difference in surface tension between alcohol and water, you get a flow of liquid from areas of low surface tension (higher alcohol content) to high surface tension (high water content). And it was this that had been thought to drive coffee stain formation in droplets which were a mix of liquids, water and alcohol for example. But how do you isolate this effect from the other effect in which alcohol evaporates more quickly than water and so there are changes in density and buoyancy of the droplet?

pendulant droplets
Drying droplets upside down. The things we do for coffee science.

To answer this you could add n-butanol to the water (or coffee) rather than alcohol. Just like ethanol based alcohol (the sort you may get in gin), n-butanol has a much lower surface tension and lower density than water but unlike alcohol, it evaporates much less readily than water. So, in a water-butanol mix it will be the water that goes first, while exactly the opposite will happen for an alcohol-water mix. In a drying droplet, the liquid evaporates most quickly from the edge of the drop. Therefore, after an initial, chaotic stage (imaginatively called stage I), you will end up with a droplet that is water rich around its rim in the alcohol-water mix but n-butanol rich around the droplet edge in an n-butanol-water mix (stage II). This suggests a way that you can distinguish the flows in the drop due to surface tension effects from those due to the differences in density between water and alcohol/n-butanol.

How would you test it? One way would be to compare the droplets evaporating as if you had spilled them on the table top with droplets evaporating ‘upside-down’, as if you had tipped the table by 180° after spilling your coffee. You can then watch the flow by taking many photographs with a camera. In this way you would be able to test whether it was surface tension flow (which should be in the same direction within the drop whether the droplet is upright or suspended) with gravity driven flow which should be opposite (the drop is upside down after all).

schematic drops upright and upside down
A cartoon of the flow found in droplets of alcohol and water mix. When upright, the flow is up through the centre of the drop and down the sides. This is expected for both surface tension based flows and flows due to gravity. When upside down, the flow is still upwards through the centre of the drop but this time the drop is upside down. So this is what you’d expect if the dense water at the edge of the drop flowed downwards (gravity based) but not if the flow were dominated by surface tension effects which should be the same, relative to the drop-interface as if the drop were upright.

The authors of the study did this and found that the flow in upright drops of alcohol-water was opposite to that in n-butanol-water drops. This is what is expected both in surface tension dominated flow and in gravity dominated flow. But, when the drops were inverted, the flow within the droplet did not change absolute direction, instead it changed direction relative to the substrate (it may be helpful to see the cartoon), in both droplet types. Expected for a gravity driven flow (dense liquids move downwards), this is exactly the opposite to what would be expected with surface tension driven flow. It is sensible to conclude that the flow in drying droplets containing two liquid types is dominated by gravity, or as the authors phrased it “density-driven flows in evaporating binary liquid droplets”.

dried upside down drops
The resultant coffee stains of drops that had been suspended upside down. They seem fairly similar to the upright ones with the exception of the central dot in many of the stains. The arrow shows some coffee that spilled down the surface as the tray was flipped over.

While the authors did a lovely job of watching the flows within the droplet, what happened to the the actual coffee stain? It could prompt us to do an experiment at home. How does adding alcohol affect the appearance of a coffee stain if the drop is upright compared to if you turned the drops all upside down? What happens if the droplet is not held upside down but instead at an angle to the vertical? There are many ways you could play with this result, see what happens, have a glass of wine and see if that gives you any insight into what you see with your coffee. As ever, have fun and if you do get any interesting results, please do let me know here, on twitter or over on FB.

 

*The dry scientific author in me wants to point out that although catchier, the title “how coffee stains form” does not actually capture the extent of the physics nor what the paper was about (the fact that this happens more often than just in coffee) and the given title was much better. The coffee drinker in me thinks yes, but, surely we could make it all about coffee anyway…

Categories
Coffee review Coffee Roasters Observations Science history slow Sustainability/environmental

A Story with many layers, Clapham Junction

Story Coffee St John's Hill Clapham
The doorway to Story, or a story depending on how you look at it.

A “ghost sign” above the door to Story Coffee on St John’s Hill ensures that you know that you have arrived at the correct place. “Peterkin Custard, Self-Raising Flour – Corn Flour, can be obtained here”, only now it is coffee rather than custard that is sold in the shop beneath. The sign is an indicator to the many tales that could be discerned while exploring the coffee within. I had had a couple of attempts to visit Story Coffee (thwarted for a variety of reasons) before Brian’s Coffee Spot’s review appeared a couple of days after one of my attempted visits. Suitably re-motivated, another trip was attempted (address checked, closing times checked) and this time we were in luck. Although a pour over is listed on the menu, sadly this was not available on our visit and so I enjoyed a lovely long black instead (Red Brick, Square Mile) while looking at the cakes on offer. There was plenty of seating in which to shelter from the rain outside and many things to notice in this friendly café. In addition to the cakes and lunch menu, a box on the counter housed “eat grub” protein bars, protein bars made of cricket powder. Are insects the future for humans to eat protein sustainably?

glass jar at Story
Through a glass darkly?
The distortions produced by the refractive indices of air, water and glass and the shape of the glass produces interesting effects on our view through it.

The tables were well arranged for people to sit chatting while enjoying their beverages and it is always an excellent thing (from a personal point of view) to encounter a café with a no laptop (or tablet) at the tables policy. Complementary tap water was available in jugs placed on each table while it was also nice to note that Story branded re-usable cups were on sale from the counter. Many things we noted can be seen in the gallery pictures in the review on Brian’s Coffee Spot: the funky fans, the egg shaped light shades, the light introduced by the large glass window panes (though it was a much fairer day on Brian’s visit than on ours). Each had its contribution to a thought train, the way the glass water jar bent the light coming through, the concept of a Prandtl boundary layer in fluids (and its connection to both fans and coffee cups). Moreover there were hexagons, which for someone who has worked on the periphery of the graphene craze, are always thought provoking.

Apart from hexagons decorating the top of the stools, there were hexagons lining the counter made of cut logs, each showing the rings from the tree that was felled. Rather than a flat surface, these hexagons were made to be different thicknesses on the wall, rather like the hexagonal columns of the Giant’s Causeway. It is a subtle thing that may have implications for the space that is otherwise surrounded by flat, solid, walls. Such spaces can become echo-y and yet, the music and conversation in Story was not overly distracting presumably because features such as the uneven hexagonal wall reflected the sound waves such that they destructively interfered rather than echoed around the room.

every tree tells a story, but which story
A macroscopic crystal of hexagonally cut logs forms the side of the counter.

Each log in the hexagonal decoration was cut with its cross-section showing a number of tree rings. We know that we can age a tree by counting the rings (though each of these would be underestimated as they have been trimmed into hexagons post-drying), but what more do the tree rings, and the trees themselves have to tell us? The rings are caused by the rapid growth of large cells during spring followed by a slower growth of smaller cells as the year progresses. But this method of growth means that the cut logs have more to tell us than just their age. The spacing between the rings can tell of the weather the tree experienced during that year, were there many years of drought for example? Such clues, from the relative density of the tree rings, can help researchers learn about the climate in previous centuries, but conversely, reading the climate report in the rings can indicate in which year a tree was felled and so the age of a building for example.

coffee at Story
Many stories start with a coffee.

And then there is more, trees will grow at an average rate per year so that, as a rough guide, the circumference of a mature (but not old) tree increases by 2.5cm per year¹. There is therefore something in the idea that you can have a good guess at how old a tree is by hugging it. But this assumes that the tree is growing in its optimum conditions, far enough from any neighbouring trees so as not to be crowded into growing more slowly. So the absolute density of tree rings must also give a clue as to whether this tree was in a dense forest or an open clearing. Which is reminiscent of something else that living trees can tell you if you listen to them closely enough: trees will grow so that their leaves are exposed to the maximum amount of light. For us in the UK, this means that the crown of a tree will frequently tip towards the south (where the Sun is most often) and there will be more leaf growth (and consequently more branches) in a southerly direction². But again, we only see this if the tree has room to grow on its own, without the crowding, and competition, of too many neighbours. A solitary tree helps us to know which direction we are walking in.

empty coffee cup Story St John's Hill
While many coffees could also tell a story. It depends on how you read them.

Which all points to the idea that there are many stories being told all around us all of the time, the ones we hear depend on what we choose to pay attention to. So what about the story behind the ghost sign above the door? The Peterkin custard company was a venture by J. Arthur Rank in an attempt to start a milling company in the mould of his father’s (Rank Hovis McDougall, later bought by Premier Foods). The company failed and Rank went on to form the Rank Organisation that was responsible for many films made throughout the 40s and 50s as well as running a chain of cinemas around the UK. Truly a sign concealing many stories.

 

Story Coffee is at 115 St John’s Hill, SW11 1SZ

¹Collins complete guide to British Trees, Collins, 2007

²The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs, Tristan Gooley, Hodder and Stoughton, 2014

 

 

 

 

Categories
Allergy friendly Coffee review Observations Tea

Hear no evil… at the Inverness Coffee Roasters, Inverness

Coffee in Inverness
Inverness Coffee Roasting Company.

Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, so the saying goes and so the monkey, that was sitting on the sofa at the Inverness Coffee Roasting company (and café) indicated. And while I would not like anything evil to be said on this website generally, today it will be taken to an extreme as this cafe-physics review will not say much at all. Not because the coffee was not good, my Americano was a lovely complex dark and very enjoyable brew. Nor because there weren’t things to write about, several avenues suggested themselves for a ‘cafe-physics’ type review. There were also plenty of things to enjoy nibbling on while sitting down in this warm and comfy environment taking in the surroundings. Chocolate from The Chocolate Place was clearly labelled (and so I could enjoy it confident that it was nut-free) with a good variety of interestingly flavoured chocolates. The chocolate/coffee combination always goes well and the salted dark chocolate indeed complemented the coffee. A variety of freshly roasted coffees were in jars ready for selling to the home-brewing crowd and I heard both people behind the counter discussing coffee tastes with different customers to ensure that they could properly recommend a coffee for each of them.

So why, if the coffee was good, the service friendly and the environment interesting am I not going to write much about Inverness Coffee Roasting Company? Well, largely because I had been on holiday and so the preoccupations of the days before would necessarily influence what I noticed about this little café. Although I could happily write about neolithic monuments and considerations about inter-generational solidarity in relation to the re-use of refuse heaps at Skara Brae (as building material) and our own use (or misuse) of refuse in our environmental behaviour today. And it could even fit into a cafe-physics review of this venue as a sign on the wall above the door invited everyone to join the Plastic Free Scotland movement. However, it is not really what a Bean Thinking cafe-physics review is about. The idea behind the cafe-physics reviews is that things are often connected in surprising and beautiful ways and we can generally only see the connections if we slow down and look for them.

hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil
Monkey on a sofa, but there was much more to notice at the Inverness Coffee Roasting Company if you looked around you.

Therefore, while you may (or may not) prefer to read about my holiday considerations of all things thousands of years old, what I thought I’d do with this café review is suggest a few things that I noticed in the café, things that offered a variety of potential thought-trains and then see what you think, what you notice, what you see (or don’t see). Perhaps you will observe something in one of the photos that clicks into a thought train for you, perhaps you can look around you, wherever you are right now – and think about the connections you could make to things you sense there instead? But whichever you do, it is a great time to sit back with a coffee (or perhaps a tea), breathe in and take in your surroundings.

Back in Inverness, the first thing of course was the monkey. Eyes shielded with an arm, suggestive of those who would prefer not to see what is in front of them. Nancy MacLean in “Democracy in Chains” notes that a training in the humanities perhaps opens students to question their society more than other, more utilitarian, subjects may do. Is it hurt pride that makes me rebel against this idea? Can’t physicists question too?

Perhaps it is connected but a sign by the door, and an identical one by the sofa, was written on the glass front of a box of coffee beans: “in emergency break glass”. This suggested so many avenues for exploration to me, I wonder which occur to others?

Behind our seats, a lizard was painted on/engraved into a stone, suggestive of fossils, geology and how we collect evidence. But a second lizard suggested a different direction. An ornamental lizard was positioned as if climbing up the counter. How do lizards climb? What is it about their feat? What connects lizards to a coffee company? Above our heads and above the door, stereotypical of Scotland perhaps, loomed a deer head complete with antlers. But this one was different: it was made of coffee beans and string. How a bean based diet could replace a meat one? The nature of units and how it would not necessarily be sensible to measure the mass of a deer in units of coffee beans? The mind jumped. Jumping beans?

Deer head in beans
Bean there done that?
Gruesome ornament or vegan friendly?

Finally, the logo of the cafe which was featured on signs around the interior and exterior of the space: a flaming coffee bean. The Maillard process and the changes in coffee as it is roasted? The nature of heat/temperature and the manner in which we measure it? What we hear as fire burns, lightning bangs or on “the first crack” of roasting and what this tells us about our atmosphere, our planet and our coffee is made of?

Whatever you notice, please get in touch, either by Facebook, Twitter, leave a comment or send me an email. But one last thing on coffee thought trains that links to real trains and is perhaps reflective back onto what it means to pause and watch. We left Inverness the day after our visit to Inverness Coffee Roasting by train. Inverness station has a relatively steep (1:60) gradient for 20 miles on leaving the station. It is Scotland in autumn, it had been raining and leaves had been falling on the line. Five or ten minutes out of the station, our train to Kings Cross juddered and came to a halt. A signal failure apparently. As the driver re-started the train, it slipped backwards, and again. We weren’t able to get up the hill. And so we had to return into Inverness station. Once back at Inverness station, the guard came across the tannoy and suggested that the signallers had given us the go-ahead to ‘have another run’ at the hill to see if we could get up it this time. So we tried again, juddering and shaking to a stop a few hundred metres beyond where we had stopped before. Back to Inverness station it was. The ever hopeful guard came across the tannoy again: “Third time lucky, fingers crossed”. This time the train left the station faster, building up speed, moving along more quickly and powering out of the station. The carriage was silent, were we going to make it? Past the first point we stopped at, past the second, a bit further, the family behind clapped, the train continued then slowed down and shook, juddered and then sped up again. We were over the hill and on our way back to London.

A last consideration on the conservation of energy and its relation to coffee and thought trains? Or a metaphor for how we may not find those connections in that cafe come to us quickly but if we persist and keep noticing, we can go on a fascinating journey?

Do let me know your thoughts.

The Inverness Coffee Roasting Company can be found at 15 Chapel Street Inverness, IV1 1NA