Slashdot Mirror
The Physics of Beer Bubbles
Roland Piquepaille writes "Yesterday, I told you about virtual beer. Today, we follow two North America researchers who are studying the physics of real beer bubbles. 'Singly scattered waves form the basis of many imaging techniques such as radar or seismic exploration.' But pouring beer in a mug involves multiply scattered acoustic waves. They are more complex to study, but they can be used to look at various phenomena, such as predicting volcanic eruptions or understanding the movement of particles in fluids like beer. They also could be used to monitor the structural health of bridges and buildings or the stability of food products over time. Read more for additional references and a photo showing how the researchers monitor beer bubbles."
I'm afraid that Frosty Piss will only be considered on topic if you're talking about Budweiser served in a chilled mug.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
They could use the random interactions of the beer bubbles as a random number generator for crypto. This is much cooler than the plain ol' lava-lamp random number generator that Sun uses.
Plus this gives the added advantage of being able to recruit college students that are torn between a degree in Art History, and one in Math by telling them that they'll be forced to work with beer. It's a Win/Win situation!
load "$",8,1
The Schwartz space ain't from Spaceballs.
Yea, because it is possible to determine now what will be worthwhile science in 50 years time... You know quantum mechanics pretty much started with physicists trying to explain how infra-red radiation behaves inside a hot oven. I doubt many people at the time expected that research to develop into solid-state physics, which is what the guys over at Intel rely on to make their CPUs...
I can hear them now..
guinness beer guys: "Mixing math with beer? Brilliant!!"
I have to return some videotapes...
I work at a bar, and sometimes i see an interesting phenomenon in beer glasses. If you leave a draft beer out and let the foam fizzle away, after a while(but not too long or the foam will disappear completely) the foam will coalesce into a ring shaped pattern of circles, equally sized and spaced and at the same distance from the rim and centre of the glass.
It takes about half an hour for this pattern to form, and for the life of me, I can't figure out what makes it!
Anyone?
Yes, the resulting element is vitamin P
It always bothers me when laypeople decide what is worth researching. Any time there's an article in which scientists are studying something without the obvious global impact of an AIDS cure, there is always a handful of posters criticizing their focus. Would we really be any closer to a cure if every person with a scientific background was required to study AIDS, and only AIDS?
Scientific breakthroughs aren't needles in haystacks, waiting to be found through tedious searching, and if only we made everyone look for them we'd find them sooner. Instead we let scientists research as they wish, the exact requirements for usefulness being decided by sources of funding, and eventually enough seemingly-unrelated, small conclusions come together to yield the breakthrough.