Pancake Physics to Cut Batter Splatter

Anonymous Coward writes "The headline just about says it all on this one. A physics grad student in the UK has come up with the mathematical formula for how to flip a pancake and have it land correctly back in the pan. The BBC has the details."

Comments

I'm gonna nit pick.

[Boss, Pointy Haired]

It will make sure the pancake will land back in the pan, as long as you understand the formula.

Understanding something does not equate to being able to do it.

I understand how a plane flies, but I can't fly one.

Re:I'm gonna nit pick.

[ender81b]

Heh. I'm a line cook here in the US and there is quite a bit more to flipping American Pancakes (I realize english pancakes are somewhat different).

Stuff like how long you wait till you flip it, the perfect angle to get the spatula underneath the pancake (directly parallel to both the grill and the pancake), what to do with blueberry/raspberry/banana/etc pancakes, what to do when the cake sticks, and the rest. I'm sure you could come up with an equation to perfectly predict this and it wouldn't mean a damm thing -- like this one.

I mean you could equally use a formula to try and tell somebody how to flip eggs and it wouldn't meen a damm thing. To train line cooks to flip the proper, and perfect, Over Easy egg requires about 100-200 wasted eggs until you get it down to about 95% of the time -- and that extra 5% is a pain since each egg varies in how much force will require before it breaks, etc and usually requires thousands of eggs before you can go nearly an entire 8 hour shift without breaking at least 1 yolk open. By 'flip' an egg I mean using only your wrist, no sissy spatulas involved. It takes alot of work and effort to learn to do these things which is why almost nobody outside cooks can probably cook eggs or omeletes the *right way*, no spatulas/informercial specials involved.

Re:I'm gonna nit pick.

[arvindn]

You are mistaken.

http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/Some-AI-Koans.html :

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong."

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

In the same way, the pancake will land back in the pan as long as you understand the formula.

[[Mods, mods: this is supposed to be _funny_. Its not the first time I've posted something hilarious and it got modded "Insightful"]].

Re:Okaaaaaay,

[sonatinas]

HEY! I buy a bag of cheetos and eat them with chopsticks (living in China). It is the best way to eat a bag without getting your laptop keyboard , or anything, dirty with deadly cheeto residue.

Something going wrong....

[isa-kuruption]

There is something seriously wrong with the education system when a grad student gets a masters in physics for writing a thesis on flipping a pancake.

What's next? Maybe, for his doctoral thesis, he should write a formula for the proper amount of syrup to be used based on it's rate of obsorbtion by the pancake.

Does anyone else see a flaw in this formula?

[mark-t]

The angular velocity is, according to the formula:

(sqrt(pi)*1g)/(d*4)

Where g is the accelleration due to gravity and d is the distance from the elbow to the pancake.

In addition to the rather obvious (or at least intuitive) flaw of not considering the size/mass of the pancake, this formula cannot possibly produce the value claimed. Dimensional analysis shows that it results in an answer measured in terms of radians per second squared, and angular velocity is always measured in just radians per second.

Of course, if they *meant* to say angular accelleration, they should have said so.

Re:Does anyone else see a flaw in this formula?

[Redwing]

The problem seems to be in the interpretation of the english representation of the equation:

The angular velocity of the object equals the square root of Pi, times the gravity divided by the distance the pancake is from the elbow times four

You took this to be :

(sqrt(pi)*1g)/(d*4)

when it should be interpreted as:

sqrt( pi*g / (d*4) )

then you get the right units.