Category: General

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Coffee review General Observations Science history

Can you see me? At 123 Gasing, KL

Coffee at 123 Gasing
Latte, Long black and chocolate muffin at 123 Gasing, PJ, KL

There are times when you can sit and observe things for quite a while before noticing the physics that becomes a cafe-physics review. There are other occasions when the subject of the review is staring you in the face indeed, it is practically there written for you, on a noticeboard in black and white. Such was the case at 123 Gasing, a cosy and quirkily decorated cafe located, strangely enough at 123 Jalan Gasing (ie. Gasing Road), in PJ, Kuala Lumpur. We enjoyed a lovely breakfast of scrambled egg, long black and a latte (along with a very rich chocolate muffin). The coffee is from Degayo (according to Malaysian Flavours) which means that it is practically a local food product (originating as it does from neighbouring Indonesia). Coffee with minimal ‘food miles’. The only point of regret about our time at 123 Gasing was that we didn’t manage to spend longer there.

decoration at 123 Gasing
Birds on the wall at 123 Gasing.

It is the decoration that strikes you as you look around this cafe. A couple of painted birds sit on top of an electrical wire, prompting the question “why do birds not get electrocuted when they sit on a wire?”. Another question painted to a notice board on the wall asks “what is it that we need that we cannot see or feel?” (answer at the end of this post). Yet it was another thought on another noticeboard that prompted this cafe physics review. That thought suggested invisibility (see picture below).

The idea of invisibility has fascinated story tellers and philosophers for millennia. Trying to render objects invisible is, understandably, very desirable for the military and the defence industry. Although we have always had access to camouflage and deception, it is only relatively recently that it has become feasible to talk about invisibility cloaks as a real possibility.

A sign at 123 Gasing
Am I invisible?

What has moved “invisibility cloaks” into the realm of reality has been the advent of a field called “metamaterials”. As the name suggests, metamaterials are not materials that occur naturally but materials that we manufacture. Combinations of different materials or repeating patterns of a specific material that interact with light in a way that the material itself would not do. The classic example is a so-called split-ring resonator (SRR). These are rings (that were first made with copper) which have a slice cut out of them. Many such rings are arranged in a repeating, lattice pattern. Due to the engineered pattern of the copper, these lattices interact with light in a way that ordinary copper does not (for details click here). Specifically metamaterials can be engineered to bend light around objects so that it appears that the object is not there.

In order to work, the artificial structures (e.g. the copper rings) must be smaller than the wavelength of light that is to be ‘bent’. This means that microwaves (which have a wavelength ranging from a few cm to a few m) can be manipulated far more easily than visible light (with a maximum wavelength of 700 nm, or about 1/100th of the size of a grain of espresso grind). At first sight this may seem disappointing until we remember that even devices that only work with microwaves would have a clear application for the defence industry (radar).

already disturbed
Hopefully not a comment on current scientific funding

There are many ethical and philosophical questions that follow from the fact that it is now within our reach to render some objects invisible. It is not a scientific question as to whether we should do it, the scientific question is whether we can. Where science and ethics collide though is in the funding issue. A subject such as this with obvious applications receives far more funding than fields that advance our understanding but do not enhance our weaponry. Indeed, one of the researchers involved in this field describes how he was “offered large sums of money (almost on the spot)” when he spoke of the potentials of the “Harry Potter project”¹. Something that is alien to those of us who work in less fashionable subject areas where funding is a constant struggle. Government funded science quickly becomes dominated by a quest for application and technology. In effect we bypass the ethical questions of whether we should do this because it is this that will get funded. Science that is not driven by obvious applications will not get funded.

Is this what we want? Should the humanities and philosophy play a role in helping to determine what research is beneficial for society and so which research receives funding? Should ethical considerations play a part in funding considerations, or should scientific research all be about the devices that we can use? It is certainly something to ponder while sipping on our long blacks.

Answer to the question “what is it that we need that we cannot see or feel? Answer in 1990 – Air, answer in 2000 – Wi-fi (though personally I think maybe this should be the answer in 2015, the given answer of “2000” was still a bit early for widespread wifi).

Further reading and [1]: “The Physics of Invisibility” Martin Beech, New York, Springer, 2012

Categories
General Home experiments Observations Science history Tea Uncategorized

Predicting the weather with a cup of coffee?

What do the bubbles on the surface of your coffee tell you about the weather?

weather, bubbles, coffee, coffee physics, weather prediction, meteorology
There is a lot of physics going on with the bubbles on this coffee, but can they be used to predict the weather?

You have just poured a cup of freshly brewed coffee into your favourite mug and watched as bubbles on the surface collect in the middle of the cup. It occurs to you that it is going to be a good day, but is that because you are enjoying your coffee or because of the position of the bubbles?

There are a large number of sayings about the weather in the English language. Some of the sayings have a basis in fact, for example the famous “red sky at night, shepherd’s delight, red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning“. Others though seem to verge on the superstitious (“If in autumn cows lie on their right sides the winter will be severe; if on their left sides, it will be mild”), or unlikely (“As August, so the next February”).  In 1869, Richard Inwards published a collection of sayings about the weather. “Weather Lore” has since undergone several new editions and remains in print although Inwards himself died in 1937. Amongst the sayings contained in the book is one about coffee:

“When the bubbles of coffee collect in the centre of the cup, expect fair weather. When they adhere to the cup forming a ring, expect rain. If they separate without assuming any fixed position, expect changeable weather.“

A quick search on the internet shows that this example of weather lore is still circulated, there is even a ‘theory‘ as to why it should be true. But is it true or is it just an old wives’ tale? Although I have consumed a lot of coffee I have never undertaken enough of a statistical study to find out if there could be an element of truth in this particular saying. The number of bubbles on the surface of the coffee is going to depend, amongst other things, on the type of coffee, the freshness of the roast and the speed at which you poured it. While the position of the bubbles will depend on how you poured the coffee into the mug, the surface tension in the coffee and the temperature. It would appear that there are too many variables to easily do a study and furthermore that the mechanism by which coffee could work as a weather indicator is unclear. It is tempting to write off this particular ‘lore’ as just another superstition but before we do that, it is worth revisiting another old wives tale which involves Kepler, Galileo, the Moon and the tides.

tides, old wives legends, Kepler, Galileo, Lindisfarne, bubbles in coffee
The pilgrim path between Lindisfarne and the mainland that emerges at low tide is marked by sticks. But what causes the tides?

Back in the mid-17th century, Newton’s theory of universal gravitation had not yet been published. It was increasingly clear that the Earth orbited around the Sun and that the Moon orbited around the Earth, but why exactly did they do that? Gilbert’s 1600 work De Magnete (about electricity and magnetism) had revealed what seemed to be an “action at a distance”. Yet the scientific thought of the day, still considerably influenced by Aristotelianism, believed that an object could only exert a force on another object if it was somehow in contact with it. There was no room for the heavenly bodies to exert a force on things that were found on the Earth. Indeed, when Kepler suggested that the Moon somehow influenced the tides on the Earth (as we now know that it does), Galileo reproached him for believing “old wives’ tales”: We should not have to rely on some ‘magical attraction’ between the moon and the water to explain the tides!

The point of this anecdote is not to suggest that a cup of coffee can indeed predict the weather. The point is that sometimes we should be a little bit more circumspect before stating categorically that something is true or false when that statement is based, in reality, purely on what we believe we know about the world. We should always be open to asking questions about what we see in our daily life and how it relates to the world around us. It will of course be hard to do a proper statistical study of whether the bubbles go to the edge or stay in the centre depending on the weather (whilst keeping everything constant). Still, there are a lot of people who drink a lot of coffee and this seems to me to offer a good excuse to drink more, so perhaps you have some comments to make on this? Can a cup of coffee predict the weather? Let me know what you think in the comments section below.

 

Weather legends taken from “Weather Lore”, Richard Inwards, Revised & Edited by EL Hawke, Rider and Company publishers, 1950

Galileo/Kepler anecdote from “History and Philosophy of Science”, LWH Hull, Longmans, Green and Co. 1959

Categories
General Home experiments Observations slow Sustainability/environmental

An opportunity to become a cafe-scientist

coffee, Timberyard, wooden tray
A great place to sit and do some citizen science: Timberyard, Seven Dials has plenty of seats outside.

There are many things to be gained from putting down your smart phone when you enter a café. Firstly, there is the opportunity to fully experience the coffee. The sounds as it is made, the smell, the taste, even the feel of the coffee. Then there is the opportunity for people watching; their behaviour as they order their coffees or have their meetings or try to alleviate boredom while playing with their smartphones. Of course, there is also the opportunity to look at the history of the café and its surroundings, to think about a café-physics review or just slow down and notice things. There’s always something interesting going on.

If you are lucky enough though to be in Athens, Barcelona, Belgrade, Berlin, Copenhagen, London, Manchester, Milan or Rome there is now even more reason to put down that phone while you savour your coffee. By doing so, you could be helping scientists with a few questions that they have about atmospheric pollutants. If you are not in one of those cities, you miss out this time, but you may want to keep reading because if enough people get involved now, perhaps next time the iSPEX-EU project may come near you.

contrail, sunset
What sort of aerosols and pollutants are floating in the atmosphere above your head at this moment?

The question is, what are the atmospheric pollutants that are in the air near where you are now? Perhaps you are in a café on a main road and the answer seems obvious, it is those cars and buses that keep passing by. But there are in fact many forms of atmospheric aerosols or particles and they range in size from a few nanometers to tens of microns (which, in terms of coffee grind is from much smaller than the smallest Turkish coffee to approximately the size of a small particle in an espresso grind). Is it really so clear that where you are, in the centre of that big city, is that polluted? If on the other hand you are on the coast in Barcelona, just how salty is that salty sea air? The iSPEX-EU project allows you to measure it and find out.

These particles of dust, salt and soot etc. can have  an effect on human and animal health, so clearly we want to know more about their distribution and their prevalence. But there are also, more subtle reasons why we may want to know about them. They may have an effect on global warming and they are certainly needed in order for clouds to form, (though as yet we still do not fully understand this process). We need more data about what aerosols are around and where they are to start to know what questions to ask (let alone answer) about health, the climate and cloud formation. Yes, we have satellite measurements and pollution data at specific locations, but what people are missing is that local information. What are you actually breathing? When you look up at the blue sky, what pollutants (or other type of aerosol) are you looking through? Can we get enough data to know how the air quality varies between the cafés of Hackney and those of Hammersmith?

Skylark Wandsworth
Another ideal cafe for iSPEX-EU measurements, great coffee and a lovely outdoor seating area at Skylark cafe, Wandsworth Common

To get this data the scientists involved in iSPEX-EU need people, many people. People who are willing to spend 5 minutes turning their iPhone (sadly it is an iPhone-only project) into a pollution detector. The more people that they can get measuring, the more data that they will be able to obtain. All you need is an app from the App-store and a (free) device that fits over your iPhone camera which you can pick up from somewhere local to you. Then, you just take a seat outside the café on a lovely blue sky day between now and the 15th October, aim your phone at the sky and take a series of photographs which are shared back with the scientists coordinating the project. If you are curious to know how your air quality compares with that in another participating city, you can check the live map to see how the measurements are going across Europe.

The device works by looking at the colour spectrum as well as the polarisation of the light reaching the camera as a function of angle. This information gives tell-tale clues as to the size of the aerosols as well as their prevalence. There is a lot more information on the website of the iSPEX-EU project and so I would recommend that if you do want to know more, you click their link here. In the meantime, why not sign up with iSPEX-EU, take a seat outside in that café and enjoy a great coffee knowing that, as you do so, you are contributing to our understanding of atmospheric science.

If you do decide to participate, please let me know of any great locations that you find, both for the coffee and the measurements, or share your pollution measurements with me in the comments section. I look forward to seeing some great data on the live map.

To get involved with the iSPEX project, you can follow the link here.

 

Categories
General Observations Science history slow

Seeing things at a kopitiam (coffee shop)

Rocky, Bangsar, KL, Malaysia, koptiam
A kopitiam in Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

One of the great things about travelling is exploring the different cafe and coffee cultures in different countries. Is it the coffee that is important? Or food, alcohol or maybe just the opportunity for socialising? In Singapore and Malaysia, the “kopitiam” (or coffee shop) is a familiar part of each neighbourhood. Each kopitiam serves local coffee (kopi) and a variety of foods which are usually prepared while you wait, from stalls around the edge of the kopitiam. The kopitiam provides a space for socialisation and meeting people over a bowl of steaming noodles. Inside electric fans are blowing continuously in an effort to lessen the heat. Frankly, the local coffee is not to my taste but there are plenty of other things to eat and drink in each kopitiam. A breakfast of “kueh” and black tea for example is a welcome change from toast at home! In many areas of Singapore, and to a lesser extent Malaysia, local kopitiams are closing to make way for the new style cafés which serve a range of freshly roasted, pour over or espresso based coffee. Not being Malaysian or Singaporean I do not want to comment too much on that, I guess it is similar to the decline of the “caffs” in the UK. Mourned by many in the community but welcomed by others for the improved quality of the coffee.

straw, water, glass
An everyday example of refraction. The water refracts the light to make the straw appear ‘broken’.

However, with so much going on in a kopitiam, the temptation to look at a kopitiam-physics review was too great, especially when I started to “see things” at the edge of the shop. Am I going mad? No, it was not that my imagination was playing with my mind; I saw the ingredients for a mirage. You see, at the edge of the kopitiam the hawkers will cook noodles, or rice dishes etc. and this creates heat. Above some stalls there will be clouds of steam rising as the noodles boil in a pan. The clouds appear white because of the scattering of light by reasonably sized water droplets (more info here and here). Above other stalls, there is no steam but the heat created by the cooking makes the air immediately above the stove warmer (and therefore less dense). This less dense air refracts light less than air at room temperature. It is refraction that causes that straw in your iced coffee to look as if it is broken as you look at it (see picture). In the kopitiam, it means that as you look through this region of warm air you see a wobbly or wavy type pattern as the light from outside is refracted by different amounts depending on the temperature of the air that it goes through. It is this that is the primary ingredient for seeing a mirage.

The fact that air at different temperatures refracts light by different amounts is the reason for mirages in the desert. Frequently, warm air is trapped at ground level by a layer of cold air above it. The light is bent as it travels through these layers (see diagram here) and so it may appear as if they sky is on the ground (which the brain will interpret as a pool of water on the ground). Conversely, if there is a layer of cold air trapped beneath a layer of warm air, the light is bent downwards and so objects that are usually below the horizon due to the curvature of the earth can be seen (illustrated by the diagram here).

Edmond Halley, Canary Wharf, Isle of Dogs, view from Greenwich
The view towards the Isle of Dogs (and Canary Wharf) from Greenwich. Things have changed a little since Halley’s time.

Back in 1694 Edmond Halley (who drank coffee with Isaac Newton at the Grecian) was investigating the evaporation of water as a function of temperature. He wanted to see if evaporation alone could explain the rainfall and the quantity of water in the river system. As he did so he noticed that, in still air, there was a layer of water vapour that formed above the bowl of evaporating water. He noticed this because it refracted the light in an unusual manner. At the time, there was reported to be an unusual phenomenon that occurred at high tide near Greenwich. It seems that cows used to graze on the Isle of Dogs in London. Ordinarily the cows could not be seen from Greenwich because they were too far away, but occasionally, at high tide, the cows would be visible. Putting together what he knew about the evaporating water Halley wrote “This fleece of vapour in still weather… may give a tolerable Account of what I have heard of seeing the Cattle at High-water-time in the Isle of Dogs from Greenwich, when none are to be seen at low-water (which some have endeavoured to explain by supposing the Isle of Dogs to have been lifted by the Tide coming under it.) But the evaporous effluvia of water, having a greater degree of refraction than the Common Air, may suffice to bring these Beams down to the Eye, which when the Water is retired, and the vapours subsided with it, pass above, and consequently the Objects seen at the one time, may be conceived to disappear at the other”*. I think that although he had the mechanism correct (in terms of refraction), the cause of this odd refraction was temperature inversion and a layer of cold air immediately above the Thames rather than water vapour but what do you think? Let me know in the comments section below.

 

* Punctuation and capitalisation kept as in original. Taken from Edmond Halley, “An Account of the Evaporation of Water, as It Was Experimented in Gresham Colledge [sic] in the Year 1693. With Some Observations Thereon” Phil. Trans. 18, 183-190, 1694″

Categories
cafe with good nut knowledge Coffee review General Observations Science history

Thinking of foraging at Damson & Co

Damson and Co, like its wild counterpart, easy to miss
Damson & Co on Brewer St.

At approximately this time of year, it is possible to start foraging for damsons in the UK countryside. These small plums make lovely cakes and muffins and, very importantly, great damson gin. A bit like sloe gin but, in my opinion, better. All this is a digression. When I found out about a cafe called Damson & Co I had to try it, purely for the name which brings back fond memories of country walks and gin shared with friends. However, even armed with its address and location on a map I missed it! Damson & Co is very inconspicuous in the way that it is situated on the street. Just as with its wild counterpart, it is easy to walk past without noticing that it’s there but once you’ve seen it, it is obvious, a location that you mark down in order to return to it again and again.

Inside, lavender decorated the table tops in the small but extremely friendly cafe. We enjoyed an Americano, an iced latte and a lovely chocolate brownie that had been warmed almost to the point of melting. They were also extremely helpful when I asked the dreaded “does it contain nuts?” question, checking the ingredients, informing me of the (obligatory) “it may have had contact with a nut at some point in its manufacture” line, but ultimately helping me to choose what was a great nut-free cake. Complementary water was automatically put onto the table and so we had, for the brief moment before I ate the cake, a range of ‘phases of matter’ on the table. Water in the forms of liquid in the bottle, solid ice and steam rising up from the coffee and a brilliantly gooey, viscous chocolate cake somewhere between liquid and solid. At that point it was quite clear what the physics bit of this cafe-physics review would have to be: phases of matter and phase changes.

interior of Damson & Co
Lavender in a jar with sugar in the window of Damson & Co

As ice melts into water, or evaporates to form steam, it undergoes many changes in its properties: Ice is of course solid; liquid water conducts heat much readily more than steam (more on this another day). Another property that changes is the heat capacity of the ice/water/steam. The heat capacity is the amount of energy that it takes to heat a substance by one degree in temperature. At the temperature that the substance changes, say between a liquid and a solid, there will frequently be a spike in a plot of “heat capacity” vs. temperature. This tells us that, as the solid changes to a liquid (or vice versa) the response of the material to being heated changes. Physicists often measure the heat capacity of substances to see if any phase changes occur. A phase change does not necessarily mean that the substance goes from liquid to solid or to gas. A substance will be said to undergo a phase change if it becomes ferromagnetic (like iron at room temperature) or if it becomes superconducting (like aluminium at approximately -272C). Back in the 1920s it was the investigation of the heat capacity of liquid helium that helped to suggest that there was a new form of matter lurking at extremely low temperatures.

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (a great physicist and apparently a very nice man) had managed to liquify helium gas in 1908. Helium gas becomes a liquid below -269C. By the 1920s it was clear that something very strange happened to liquid helium if you cooled it even more, to temperatures below -271C. The behaviour of the heat capacity spiked indicating that the helium was undergoing another phase change, but to all appearances it was still a liquid. There was no indication that the helium was solidifying, what could it be? More experiments revealed that below -271C the helium liquid started to behave very strangely indeed. It climbed up the walls of its container ‘by itself’ and it managed to leak through minuscule cracks in the glass containers that it was kept in (for a video click here). Cracks that could not be detected before the ultra-cold helium started to leak through them. It took until 1937/38 before this new state of matter was named and it is still not clear that we understand it.

There is so much more to the phases of matter than meets the eye while watching ice melt in a glass of water on a hot summer’s day.

Damson & Co can be found at 21 Brewer St. London

Categories
General Observations slow

The coffee cave

Americano, Caravan coffee, Skylark, Wandsworth
Gazing into a coffee you can see the reflection of your face looming back at you.

Have you ever gazed into your coffee as you take a mouthful only to get disturbed to see a distorted view of your face looming back at you from the coffee? Has it struck you that while you often see such reflections, you rarely see shadows? Try it first with water and then coffee. Can you, perhaps, see a shadow on the coffee where you cannot see shadows on the water? Why would this be?

For a shadow to be visible on a surface, the surface must scatter enough light so that the contrast between shadow (where there is no light to scatter) and non-shadow (where the surface is illuminated) can be seen. Although a shadow (or at least the relative lack of light) is always going to be present behind any obstacle, it is whether or not it can be seen on the surface of the water/coffee that is at issue here. Pure water is of course quite transparent. Without anything in the water to scatter the light (such as mud for example), the light passes straight through the water to the other side. Overall, not enough light is scattered back from the surface of the water to generate the contrast required for seeing shadows. Seeing shadows on pure water is going to be hard.

Chemex, 30g, coffee
The concentration of suspended particles will depend on how you make your brew

By contrast, coffee contains suspended particles, in fact they are part of the very essence of the drink. These particles offer a surface to scatter the light back towards the observer and so highlight the shadows formed by the object between the coffee and the light. It strikes me that different brew methods will result in different amounts of sediment and suspended particles in the coffee and therefore a greater or lesser tendency of the coffee to reveal shadows. Perhaps if anyone does notice that it is harder to form shadows on coffee prepared by a Chemex  than a French Press (for example) they could let me know using the comments section below.

Shadows have been used by philosophers to illustrate by allegory how we perceive the world around us. In the tale of Plato’s cave a group of prisoners are held in a cave such that they can only ever see the shadows playing on the cave’s wall. The shadows are formed by a fire behind the prisoners that the prisoners cannot see. As they can only see the shadows, they start to think that it is the shadows themselves that are ‘real’. It is a tale questioning the reality of what we currently see and also our inability to adjust to the differences between looking directly at the Sun or discerning shadows in the dark. In the story of the cave, it is the fire, or the Sun that causes the shadows that deceive the prisoners. No consideration was given to the role played by the wall on which the shadows dance. Yet we can see from our coffee that to understand the world of shadows we do not merely need a light source. To understand shadows, we need a surface from which to reflect the shadows. Perhaps we need to spend some time contemplating our coffee, the shadows and what they can tell us about the world and how we see it.

For details about this and other phenomena involving light and its interaction with the world around us, see: “Color and Light in Nature”, David K. Lynch and William Livingston

 

Categories
General Observations Tea

Dynamical similarity

vortices in coffee
A vortex … (Dragging a spoon through a cup of coffee)

Science involves designing experiments to test theories. I do not want to get distracted here by how a theory is defined or the precise ways in which a theory is tested by experiment. The point of this week’s Daily Grind is to look at the role of experiments in physics, where they can be used, where it is more difficult to use experiments to test hypotheses and, how this can be connected with coffee. Some physics can be relatively easily tested by observation or experiment: we can for example take photographs of distant no-longer-planets to test theories about the evolution of the solar system or measure the viscosity of a liquid as we add something to it. Yet there are some areas of physics where it is not immediately obvious how you would test any theory that you develop. One such area is atmospheric physics where the limitations of living on one planet with one atmosphere where many different things all happen at once, could potentially be a bit of a problem for doing experiments on the theories of atmospheric physics.

vortices, turbulence, coffee cup physics, coffee cup science
… is a vortex… (What happens if you put a coffee on a record player?)

Fortunately, there is a way in which atmospheric physicists can test their theories with experiment and, perhaps unsurprisingly for the Daily Grind, that way involves a cup of coffee (or tea). The route out is called “dynamical similarity” and it is a consequence of the fact that the same mathematics describes much of that which happens in a cup of tea as it does the atmosphere. It is true that a tea cup is a lot smaller than the atmosphere but a vortex in a tea cup is the same as a vortex in the atmosphere even if one is only a centimetre across while the other has a core size of many kilometres. The mathematics will be the same. This allows people to test hypotheses formed about the atmosphere in an environment that they can control and repeat.

A vortex in the atmosphere
… is a vortex.
(Typhoon Nangka, Image Credit: NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC. Caption by Kathryn Hansen)

A couple of months ago, I wrote an article in Physics World about the connections between coffee and physics. Shortly after it came out, I got an email from Paul Williams alerting me to an article that he had written in the journal Weather called “Storm in a tea cup“. It turns out that the subject of his research had been to study the impact on the weather of the interaction of two types of atmospheric waves: Rossby Waves and Inertia-gravity waves. The method that he had used to test this was, if not quite a tea cup, a bucket which he could rotate. Rossby waves and inertia-gravity waves are both present in the atmosphere and can be induced, albeit on a smaller scale, in a bucket. He was using the concept of dynamical similarity to explore what happens in our atmosphere. And the experiment was important. Before his experiments, it had been thought that the effect of the interaction of these two sorts of waves was minimal. His experiments revealed that this may not be the case, the inertia-gravity waves can significantly affect the Rossby waves. Given that Rossby waves are responsible for cold/warm fronts and weather phenomena in mid-latitude regions of the world (such as the UK) his results, and his cup of tea, were potentially very important.

I’m always very happy to hear about what others are doing with science in a tea cup or a coffee mug. Please share any thoughts in the comments section below.

Paul Williams “Storm in a tea cup” can be found in Weather, 59, (4), p.96 (2004) 

With apologies to Gertrude Stein.

Categories
cafe with good nut knowledge Coffee review General Observations

Diamonds are forever at Violet, Hackney

the outside of Violet
Violet in Hackney

Violet is not quite where I expected it to be. I had expected it to be in a row of shops on a main street, instead it is tucked away, a little cafe in a back street in Hackney. Despite the relative anonymity, Violet has won awards for the quality of its cakes. Award winning cakes are hard to resist and so, a few weeks ago I went along to Violet to try the coffee. With a couple of seats outside and a large room upstairs with seating, it is very easy to enjoy a good coffee and a cake while taking in the surroundings. The cakes certainly do not disappoint and, importantly for Bean Thinking, they know exactly what goes in them, meaning that if you are allergic to nuts or have other food allergies or intolerances, they are incredibly helpful. They definitely get a tick in the “cafe with good nut knowledge” category.

As it had been raining when we tried Violet, we decided to take a seat upstairs. Stacked in one corner of the room were a set of wooden chairs, reminiscent of those chairs that we had to stack at school. Each chair fitted almost exactly onto the previous one. At the top of the stack of chairs however, the uppermost chair did not fit exactly onto the previous chair, it was as if there was a defect in the stack.

stack of chairs, Violet
The chair stack in Violet.

The diagonal legs of the chairs resembled the multiple strata in a layered substance such as graphite. Each layer of graphite features a hexagonal arrangement of carbon atoms forming a structure very much like the chair legs in the chair stack. Graphene, a material of which there is currently a lot of hype, is a single layer of graphite. The carbon equivalent of one chair leg on its own. Carbon is a fascinating element. If, rather than being arranged in layers, it is arranged into a more 3D crystal structure, then you get diamond, a colourless, extremely hard crystal structure, very different from graphite. It is in diamond that defects in the stacking structure (such as with the uppermost chair) can cause spectacular effects.

If the carbon atoms are arranged into a perfect crystal structure, (the equivalent to the chairs being perfectly stacked), then diamond is colourless. If on the other hand, something happens to disrupt the structure, perhaps there is one carbon atom missing in the structure or maybe another, impurity element, such as nitrogen, has got in, the way that the electrons in the diamond react to light changes. This means that it can take on a colour. The introduction of nitrogen for example, in concentrations of only 0.1% will make the diamonds more yellow or orange. Red diamonds are a consequence not of impurities but simply defects in the crystal arrangement. The equivalent to that one last chair in the chair stack changing the properties of the stack completely. Knowing that the colour of a diamond is a result of a defect in the arrangement of carbon atoms in the structure offers us two possible viewpoints. Either people who buy red diamonds are paying a premium for defective goods, or, beauty takes many forms and what is beautiful is not necessarily what is regular and perfect. I know which view of the world I prefer to take.

Comments are always welcome, please click in the box below.

Violet is at 47 Wilton Way, E8 3ED

Categories
General Home experiments

Notes on a cup

Ritzenhoff Mugs
Experimental apparatus

An opportunity for an experiment with a cup of coffee. Sadly though, for the experiment itself, it would probably help if the mug were empty, so there are two choices: Either grab a coffee and drink it so that you have the empty cup next to you, or get an empty cup and wait for your coffee until later. There is though, perhaps a third choice, get two cups, one with coffee in it, one empty, that sounds a much better idea.

Now, get a pen or pencil and start to tap the rim of the cup, make note of the sound that the cup makes as you tap at a point next to the handle, moving around to 45º from the handle, 90º from the handle etc. Perhaps compare the sound of different mugs but, on going around any particular cup, what do you hear? The note that you will hear when you tap the mug just next to the handle, or at 90º intervals from the handle should be lower than the note that you hear at 45º angles to the handle. Why is that?

wobbly bridge, Millennium Bridge
“Couple at St Pauls”, photograph © Artemisworks Photography. The ‘wobbly bridge’ is in the background.

Before answering that question, and to give you some time to think about it, it may be time to consider a (related) anecdote. Back at the turn of the millennium, a new ‘shard of light’ was built across the Thames. The Millennium Bridge takes pedestrians from the Tate Modern on the South bank towards St Paul’s on the North bank (or vice versa). It opened on 10th June 2000 and then closed, two days later, owing to problems that left it labelled the ‘wobbly bridge’. Along with many people, I had been taken in by the newspaper headlines of the time saying that we had built a terrible and wobbly bridge. It wasn’t until I was researching St Katherine’s Docks for the White Mulberries cafe-physics review that I found David Blockley’s book, ‘Bridges, the science and art of the world’s most inspiring structures’ and learned the true story. It turns out that the reason the bridge wobbled was because of a previously unknown phenomenon. Dubbed ‘synchronous lateral excitation’, it is a human crowd response to a platform swaying under their feet. Apparently in response to a swaying platform, people will widen their gait slightly to compensate for the wobble, only this acts to increase the sideways force on the platform itself and so can amplify the wobble. This bit had been known, what had not been appreciated was how the ‘wobble’ would grow if a crowd were present. The reason that the wobbly bridge surprised everyone was that never before had the critical mass of pedestrians been walking on a susceptible bridge. According to Blockley, 156 people walking along a particular section of the (original) Millennium Bridge did not cause a problem, but 166 walking in a group along the bridge caused the wobble to quickly become very appreciable.

hitting Zorro
Poor Zorro being experimented upon.

The solution, of course, was to damp the structure, to add shock absorbers and weights to the bridge so that the oscillation decreased. The cup is behaving similarly. Each time you tap the cup, you are exciting a standing wave around the rim of the mug, this is what is exciting the sound. This vibration has four points of maximum oscillation (called anti-nodes) and four stationary points (nodes) around the mug spaced at equal intervals. If the cup is hit so that the handle (which adds a relative weight to one side of the cup) is at a point of maximum oscillation, the mass that is being moved is greater than if there is a node at the handle so it does not have to move. This change of mass shifts the frequency of the oscillation and so the note is lower than when the handle is at a point of zero movement. For more information on the standing waves in your cup click here.

So it’s not just science in your coffee cup, a world of engineering is mirrored in your brew too.

Bridges – the science and art of the world’s most inspiring structures, by David Blockley was published by Oxford University Press in 2010, it is well worth a read as it is a very accessible and informative guide to bridges as well as being entertaining.

If you notice any engineering in your coffee cup, why not let me know via the comments section below or by contacting me via email.

Categories
Coffee review General Science history Tea

All in a Glaze at Straits Times Kopitiam

Straits Times KopiTiam, outsideDespite the name, “Straits Times Kopitiam” is in Aldgate, London. Kopitiam translates to “coffee shop” and they can be found throughout Singapore and Malaysia. It’s not just coffee though, Kopitiams traditionally sell a wide range of fantastic noodles & rice dishes which will be taken for breakfast or lunch while chatting with friends. A couple of large communal tables in this Aldgate kopitiam provide the space for sitting down and chatting with your neighbours, while the selection of food on offer is very western, with sandwiches and cakes replacing some of the more typical Asian dishes. Although this is a bit of a shame, it is perhaps understandable. Hopefully, as time goes on we will get more great SE Asian food here and it will become more economically viable to sell it. Still, the Straits Times Kopitiam is, just as its SE Asian namesakes, a place where you can sit and enjoy a drink in very friendly surroundings. As we were sitting there, various people came in to chat about the crayon drawings on the wall at the back while messages were suspended on bits of string around the sides of the cafe. Such touches add to its friendly, almost intimate, social atmosphere. You may not know who roasts the coffee here but where else could you get a Teh halia (a type of tea with ginger), a hot chocolate with chilli or, a Milo Dinosaur (if you like iced drinks it is probably better for you to try it rather than have me describe it)?

enamel mug, teh halia, Straits Times kopitiam
An enamel mug containing Teh halia

A feature common both to the Straits Times Kopitiam and many such places in SE Asia though is the cups, enamelware cups with a navy rim. Such cups were apparently ubiquitous until fairly recently when they faded from fashion, though they are now back in a type of retro-chic, Singapore style. The great advantage of metal cups was that they were cheap and easy to produce. So in a world before plastic, a metal mug was the way to go. That said, metal crockery and cookware can tend to rust, or look a bit ugly and so the cheap metal cups were often enamelled to produce the type of mugs that are now used in Straits Times Kopitiam.

The story of how the mugs are enamelled leads us to the story behind the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. How? Well, enamelling uses the fusing of a glass onto the metal by heating it to approximately 800 C. Glass can be quite transparent and colourless so what gives it the white and blue colouring of the mugs used in the Straits Times Kopitiam? The blue is fairly easy, it is caused by the addition of metal oxides such as cobalt, but the white? That is harder to pin down and although some investigation suggested that some chemical additives could be used to make the enamel more opaque, it was also suggested that the opacity of the white enamel is due to the crystallisation of the glass.

Giants Causeway, lava crystals
A view of the Giant’s Causeway, taken by Jim “code poet” and shared under Creative Commons attribution license. Original  file location:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/alphageek/20005235/

When a substance is heated above its melting point and then cooled, crystals can grow in it, the size and shape of which depend on the heat treatment of the material, for example how fast you cool it from its melting point. For enamel the material is glass but this crystallisation process can also be seen in chocolate. The heat treatment makes the difference between the formation of long crystals that give chocolate a hard, crisp sheen and smaller crystals that make the chocolate more dull, which is why the technique of tempering chocolate is so tricky. James Keir (1735-1820) wrote a study in the Royal Society’s journal Philosophical Transactions that described how glass crystallised as it was cooled. In particular he noted that cooling the glass slowly from its molten state produced a white and opaque type of glass that was at the time being called Reaumur’s porcelain. By studying the shape, form and cause of these crystals in glass, Keir made a sudden extrapolation: could the regular shapes of the Giant’s Causeway or the pillars of Staffa be caused by crystallisation of molten lava? This is indeed the explanation that we now have of the Giant’s Causeway*. Rather than being put into place step by step by a road building giant, the slow cooling of molten lava produced the crystal structures that are now visible on the shoreline.

Concerned that it would be thought that the had overstated the connection from glass to molten lava and geological features, Keir wrote at the end of his paper:

“No just objection can be drawn against this analogy from the magnitude of the former [lava] compared with the minuteness of the latter [glass]: for the difference of size between the small vitreous crystals and the stupendous basaltic columns, which support mountains, islands, and provinces, is no more than is proportionate to the difference usually observed between the little works of art and the magnificent operations of nature“.

Does any more need to be said?

Straits Times Kopitiam is at 66A Whitechapel High Street,

“On the crystallizations Observed on Glass. By James Keir, Esquire, of Stourbridge. Communicated by G. Fordyce, M.D.F.R.S” Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond., 1776, 66, 530-542

* Note added 21 Oct 2015. It seems that we’re still debating how the Giant’s Causeway was formed. A recent article (here) suggests it is about how things crack as they cool rather than about how crystals form. However, the link to cooling glass and cooling ceramics remains. Keir was certainly on to something.