Chocolates aid physics discovery, ummmmm.

[TacticalPeek]

Chocolates aid physics discovery

February 16, 2004

Princeton physicist Paul Chaikin's passion for M&M's was so well known that his students played a sweet practical joke on him by leaving a 250-litre drum of the little chocolates in his office.

Little did the American university students know that their prank would lead to a physics breakthrough.

The barrel full of plain M&M's made Professor Chaikin think about how well they packed in. A series of studies have shown they pack more tightly than perfect spheres. That surprises many physicists and Professor Chaikin. "It is a startling and wonderful result," Sidney Nagel, a physicist at the University of Chicago, said.

"One doesn't normally stop to think about this. If you did, you might have guessed what would happen, but you'd have guessed wrongly."

more

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/02/16/1076779845275.html

[pagerbear]

1. I'd be willing to help

...in any research involving M&Ms.

[buckeye1]

2. I read this.

As a kid I loved M&M's. It just blew my mind to think of a 55 gal. drum full of them. Its a great story. Whimsical affection yields scientific breakthrough. There is some good news after all.

[Cat Atomic]

3. I'm not a physicist, but why is this surprising?

Boxes are cube-shaped for a reason. You can pack more of them into a space. Sphere's have lots of space between them. They're the most efficient containers in terms of surface area, but they're the most wasteful when stacked. So... isn't it just common sense that the less spherical a thing is, the tighter is can be packed?

[buckeye1]

4. Agreed.

If they were flat circles like tortillas imagine how many could fill said drum. Or inflated basket balls vs deflated ones. Perhaps physicists don't ever think that way. It must take an MBA in material handling.

[TacticalPeek]

6. IANAP either, but thinking about and experimenting with ideas like this

can be elucidating, and have non-obvious outcomes. By the way, in this example, I believe the container was a cylinder (app. 66 gal drum), not a box. Some of the output from thinking these things through can naturally depend on what you start with, such as trying to pack things in a container vs packing things around a nucleus.

Buckminster Fuller devoted much thought to 'closest packing', and it's implications for the nature of the universe.

For some interesting links, google: bucky balls "closest packing".

Bucky was a very interesting thinker.

[Redleg]

5. A bunch of brown-nosing students...

How nice- they all get A's.

[mike1963]

7. In a somewhat related subject, there are some interesting experiments

in 'piling up' various shapes and how the compressive forces are distributed...like a big pile of tomatos and why the bottom ones don't get squished.
;-)

I don't have any links but it's something I've done some studying on it.