I have long been looking forward to trying the Lost Sheep coffee pod in Canterbury. How would the reality compare to the friendly and knowledgable impression they give on social media? Being mostly a take-away outlet, what was their attitude to the disposable coffee cup problem? We had ensured that we had packed our keep-cups when we left London so that we could enjoy a coffee without having to use a disposable cup. Little did we know.
The sheep was visible as we approached the Lost Sheep coffee pod from the direction of the High Street. Adjacent to the pod, people were drinking their coffee while standing at the chip-board standing-bar nearby. In front of us in the queue, another customer was buying what appeared to be his usual coffee in his re-usable cup. The conversation between the customer and barista showing that cafés that help build communities do not have to come in standard formats. ‘Pods’ can work as well as cafés inside buildings (though the Lost Sheep has one of those too over in Ashford). The queue ahead of us enabled us to take more time to study the environment of the Lost Sheep.
Interestingly, a set of ceramic cups were placed above the espresso machine. Although we saw none in use, presumably this means that should you wish to enjoy your coffee at the bars, you can do so, even if you have forgotten your reusable. What a great feature for a take-away coffee place. The friendliness of this café was apparent as I presented my keep-cup for my long black. Commenting on the design of the cup (glass with a cork handling ring, perfect in size for the coffees I mostly drink), we continued to enjoy a short conversation about keep-cups and how nice the size was for the coffee. The coffee was amazingly fruity, a sweet, full bodied brew roasted locally in Whitstable. It was great to be able to enjoy this interesting coffee while wandering as a tourist in my old home-town.
Before leaving the Sheep though, we did notice the lighting. A yellow hue from the lights immediately above the espresso machine with a whiter, harsher light from the luminescent strip light at the edge of the pod (a dull sunlight surrounding the rest of the outdoor space on this cloudy day). Coals are red hot, the Sun appears more yellow, how does colour vary with temperature? And how does this link to an old story that links quantum physics (very quickly) to your coffee cup.
How things absorb and emit light and electromagnetic radiation has been a subject of study really since white light was split into its different colours and then it was found that there was ‘invisible’ light beyond the blue and far from the red. It was known in the nineteenth century that things (which physicists tend to like to call ‘bodies’ for reasons that become clearer later) that absorbed all the light incident on them re-emitted the light unequally. As they absorbed all the incident light, they could be called a ‘black bodies’. People knew that the radiated light from a black body formed a spectrum that depended upon the temperature of the body. For most things that we encounter on earth, such as the coffee cup, their temperature means that they will emit more strongly in the infra-red, we can feel the heat coming off of them but we can’t see it. But as things get hotter they start to glow ‘red-hot’ and then if we heated them still further, they would glow with different colours.
The stars show this with the colour of the star being an indicator of the temperature of the star. Stars that are very hot shine blue, those that are cooler (but still thousands of degrees Celsius) appear to us as more white. Although these stars are emitting light at all frequencies, they show a characteristic peak in emissions for one frequency. The corresponding “black body spectrum” was very well known in the nineteenth century but the problem was that classical physics just could not explain it. Attempts were made to describe the curve but when it came down to it, if the energy (ie radiation) was described using classical physics, the shape of the curve could not be explained. While classical physics predicted the shape of the curve very well at long wavelengths (reds, infra-reds), there was a failure at shorter wavelengths. And not just a failure, it was a catastrophe: the theory predicted that an infinite amount of energy would be emitted at the low wavelengths. Clearly this is wrong, nothing can emit an infinite amount of energy and so for this reason, the problem was described as the “ultra-violet catastrophe“.
A solution came when Max Planck changed the assumptions about how energy was emitted or absorbed. Rather than the continuous emission that was expected in classical physics, Planck reasoned that energy was emitted in discrete packets and that, crucially, these “quanta” were dependent on the frequency of the light being emitted. Planck’s formulation allowed for a mathematical description of the curve. Finally the shape of the black body spectrum could be explained, but it came at quite a cost; it came at the expense of classical physics. To use Planck’s formula meant abandoning some aspects of classical physics in favour of a new quantum model and it meant leaving the absolutes of classical mechanics and entering into a new statistical world. This change didn’t come easily even to Planck who had been motivated to study physics by the absolute answers that the theory of thermodynamics seemed to provide. He wrote, regarding his own black body theory:
In some ways, that feeling that you experience while warming your hands on a cup of steaming coffee while basking in the late afternoon sunshine is an intrinsically quantum experience. Neither the infra-red heat of your cup nor the colour spectrum of the sun could be explained using purely classical physics. So while taking time to appreciate the heat of your coffee, perhaps it’s worth remembering that this feeling that you are experiencing comes as a result of the same physics as determines the hot glow of stars and the cold microwave glow of the universe. The coffee heating your hands is indicating that the world is stranger than you may think, a quantum world being revealed to you all the while you sip your coffee.
Lost Sheep coffee is in St George’s Lane, CT1 2SY