Category: Observations

Categories
Coffee review Observations Sustainability/environmental

Seeing the trees for the wood at OJO Coffee, Bangsar, KL

coffees on display at OJO
OJO Coffee, Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur

It is very easy to sit for a long time watching the people and the surroundings at OJO Coffee in Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur. Initially I had thought that this medium-sized café with an impressive number of power points dotted around it was an independent. However similarities with CoffeaCoffee around the corner and a couple of other clues (CoffeaCoffee t-shirts) suggest that it is actually part of the CoffeaCoffee chain, something that was confirmed when I asked the barista. However, the standard of coffee in this chain should prompt some of the smaller independents to up their game a bit (and certainly all of the UK based chains). Not content with just serving the typical coffees of ‘latte’, ‘cappuccino’ etc. (which are made using their own blend), OJO’s additionally serves about 15 types of single origin coffee made with your choice of method (Hario V60, Aeropress or French press). For a while this summer I became a bit of a regular at OJO and so I would particularly recommend the Indonesian Sumatran prepared by V60, but with so many coffees to choose from (from the relatively local Indonesians to South American coffees from much further afield) there is plenty to try at this café.

wooden mosaic
The wall made of wood at OJO

The interior of OJOs is decorated with many types of wood. Different cuts of wood are made into a sort of wood mosaic on the wall while the tables are made using several types of wood so as to give a symbolism about the Sun that is a type of motif of the café. Much of the floor is wood too and so this got me thinking about the rainforests in this country. Malaysia has a rich variety of wildlife and forest, it is home to the Orangutan as well as many other species. Teak trees that can be used for more expensive furniture grow along the roadside. Much of this timber can be obtained sustainably and in a way that respects the rainforest and I am certainly not suggesting that the wood in OJOs was anything but sustainable. However, perhaps inevitably, there are many pressures on these invaluable forests. Some of these pressures have, in the recent past, resulted in significant deforestation. One such pressure is that of palm oil.

Palm oil is a massively useful commodity. It is now used in food products from margarine to biscuits to raisins (surprising but true, check the ingredients list of a packet of raisins) and non-food products such as soaps. It is literally everywhere. Both Malaysia and its neighbour, Indonesia, have profited enormously from growing and exporting palm oil. Unfortunately, at times the rainforest is cleared to make way for the palm oil plantations. As it is easier to burn felled trees to clear the land rather than to painstakingly pull the roots up by hand, the cleared forest is burned. But the ground is not any ordinary soil, the ground is often peat based which means that the fires on the surface penetrate deep below the ground and produce phenomenal amounts of smoke.

If at this point you were wondering where the ‘physics’ bit of this café-physics review is, I assure you it is coming. It is indeed linked to this environmental story and to OJOs, please keep with me.

Each year, parts of Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia are enveloped by a haze produced by this burning peat land (It made the BBC in 2013 when it was particularly bad, but some haze is present for a few weeks every year). Haze has the appearance of thick fog but smells of smoke. At times, visibility can be reduced such that the tops of nearby tall buildings are obscured. Each time land needs clearing for new palm oil plantations, this smoke is produced. The haze can be reduced by local weather patterns but on many days, the haze is cleared by the torrential rains that can occur in this part of the world.

the haze is coming in
L-R: The haze comes in over part of KL in 2013 (series of 3 pictures)

It is commonly said that ‘rain clears the air’ but this is not completely true. It is not the raindrops themselves that somehow wash the air free of the dust of the haze, it is the vortices that form behind them*. Just as a spoon dragged through coffee produces vortices behind it, so a raindrop falling through the air forms vortices in its wake. The size of these vortices will depend on the size of the drop and the speed at which it falls through the air; a tea spoon and a dessert spoon pulled at different speeds through the coffee similarly produce different forms of vortex. So the amount of dust that is ‘sucked in’ and falls to the ground will depend on the type of rain that falls. Perhaps if you are in Malaysia, Singapore or Indonesia when this haze is present, you could make a study of which sort of rain clears the air most effectively. I have an idea but not the evidence to see if the idea is correct, it would be interesting to know what you think.

As I left OJO one afternoon, the rain had started to come down. The rain, or at least the vortices behind the raindrops, cleared some of the haze that had been around earlier. It is a temporary solution to a longstanding problem. A more long lasting solution may be to start (or continue) asking manufacturers of those biscuits you are eating: just how sustainable is the palm oil they are using?

OJO is at No 23, Jalan Telawi 3, KL

* JR Saylor and BK Jones, Physics of Fluids, 17, 031706 (2005)

 

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
Coffee review Observations Science history

Enlightenment at Timberyard, Seven Dials

coffee, Timberyard, wooden tray
Great coffee at Timberyard

It is not often that you come across an independent café in central London that has great coffee, a good deal of space and seats available and so I found myself very happy to have come across Timberyard near Seven Dials. As I ordered my long black, I was presented with a choice of bean for the espresso base. Should I have the “fruity and acidic” Jabberwocky, or the “chocolate” Climpsons? I was trying Timberyard for the first time and so the choice was easy. For me ‘chocolate’ will win over ‘fruity’ every time. However having the choice was a nice touch. Being in central London, it was of course crowded when I tried it, but there were still seats around, including some stools outside. I took a seat outside, ready to watch the people and the cars going by. After a short while, the coffee was brought over, served on a wooden tray together with a complementary bottle of water.

crema on coffee, Timberyard
The patterns as the crema breaks up are reminiscent of the coastlines of Norway and of fractal mathematics.

It was a very pleasant location to sit and enjoy my coffee while I watched people rushing by on their way to various meetings and tourists milling around, taking their time to soak in the city. As I waited for the coffee to cool, the crema on the surface started to break up and I was reminded of the coastline of Norway. It struck me that the same mathematics of fractals describes the coastlines as would describe the patterns in the crema. It was then that I noticed the street lighting. A light converted from an old style gas lamp was attached to the wall of a shop just across from where I was having my coffee. In the other direction, there was a modern lamp-post of one particular design and then, just slightly further down the road, a lamp-post of a different design. This prompted me to think about the history of street lighting and also the problems with it.

One of the first roads in England to be lit at night was the Route du Roi (nowadays known as Rotten Row) that ran from Kensington Palace to St James Park. Three hundred lamps were hung from trees along the route. These first street lights produced light by burning fuel, a method of street lighting which existed in one form or another until fairly recent times (as evidenced by the oldest street lamp visible from Timberyard). They were installed, as now, to try to reduce crime; it seems that the park used to be frequented by highwaymen. One of these had been hanged for the killing of a woman in the park in 1687. Though it wasn’t quite murder: Rather than be robbed of her wedding ring, the unfortunate lady had attempted to swallow it and so choked to death.

gas lamp, Monmouth St
An old style street lamp on Monmouth St. visible from Timberyard

A more recent type of street light was based on sodium. Applying an electric voltage across a gas of sodium caused the sodium to emit light in the yellow region of the visible spectrum. If rather than sodium, the lights had been based on neon gas, the colour of the light emitted would have been different as the colour corresponds to the different energy levels in the atoms, (for more info click here). In an effort to find increasingly efficient light sources, there is now a move into street lighting based on LEDs (Light emitting diodes). Rather like the sodium lamps, such devices work by applying a voltage over a material but in the case of the LEDs, the material is a semiconductor junction (where the energy gap can be manipulated to have the same size as the energy of visible light). LEDs have the significant advantage that the voltage supplied to produce sufficient lighting can be much less than is the case for sodium lights. This increase in efficiency is a small but effective way to limit our carbon dioxide emissions, especially when used together with sensors on the lamp post to detect when it is dark enough to actually necessitate the light being turned on.

Such a combination of energy saving measures benefits not just the planet but the public wallet. Perhaps in a few years time we’ll see such a set of eco-friendly lamp-posts spring up near Timberyard to add to the collection of street lights there.

In the meanwhile, if you visit Timberyard and notice some interesting physics or history, or if you just slow down and see something interesting, please let me know using the comments box below.

Timberyard is at 7 Upper St Martin’s Lane, Seven Dials, WC2H 9DL (and Old St, EC1V 9HW.)

London info taken from The London Encyclopaedia (3rd Ed), Hibbert et al.

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
Coffee review Observations Science history slow

Bridging worlds at White Mulberries, St Katherine’s Docks

chalkboard at White Mulberries
Sign board at White Mulberries.

Five minutes walk from the Tower of London is an area that feels far removed, physically and metaphorically, from the crowds swarming around the central tourist sights. St Katherine’s Docks offer a peaceful retreat a stone’s throw away from the bustle of the Tower. And if you are in this area, there is no better place to have a coffee (and potentially a cake) than White Mulberries. This café looks over the central basin of the three docks in St Katherine’s and is, seemingly, in the only 19th century warehouse still standing in the docks. On each occasion I have visited White Mulberries the coffee has been very good. As a black coffee drinker, the taste of the coffee has to be great as there is no hiding a bitter espresso with the milk of a latte and White Mulberries has passed every time (their website says that they rotate the coffee roasters, so I can only assume that they have a great relationship with their suppliers). If Latte Art is your thing though, White Mulberries also has that. It was an example of the latte art at White Mulberries that accompanied my recent article in Physics World.

Bascule Bridge, St Katherine's Docks
A moving bridge at the entrance to St Katherine’s Docks. There are youtube videos of this opening.

The point of a “café-physics” review on Bean Thinking though is only partly about the great coffee on offer (all cafes that are featured in the Daily Grind have great coffee). Part of the point of a café-physics review is to look around, slow down and notice things and see what physics there is around the café in question. There is always something to notice, always something science-like to appreciate. White Mulberries is no different, with an enormous number of things to notice, from the water in the docks to the Aeolian harps made by the rigging on the yachts moored nearby. What I would like to concentrate on today though are the bridges. Bridges are often used in scientific outreach with children. I think it is partly because so many concepts in physics can be communicated by practising making bridges. Forces need to be balanced (Newton), stress and strain needs to be considered, the properties of materials are unconsciously learned. And this, I think is another reason that bridges are a great ‘outreach’ tool, because bridges are inherently multidisciplinary. To make a good bridge requires elements from physics, chemistry, mechanical and civil engineering and art to name just a few. A bridge needs to satisfy the aesthetic demands of the public that use it as well as the structural demands of the people that will stand on it. And the bridges in the docks required yet more work and more understanding, for these aren’t just bridges that span a waterway, these bridges need to move somehow to allow boats to pass, either by having a platform that rises up (as with the nearby Tower Bridge), or platforms that swing around (which was the design of some of the original bridges at St Katherine’s Docks). Great thought and understanding went into the design and building of these mechanisms for moving the bridges. There is much to be gained by contemplating bridge design.

Microcord image of Tower Bridge with tourist in foreground
Tower Bridge, Photo © Artemisworks Photography, http://www.artemisworks.plus.com

Which brings us to another bridge, this time a metaphorical one between White Mulberries and the Coffee Houses of the past. The designer of St Katherine’s Docks was Thomas Telford (1757-1834). As well as specifying the design of the docks, he was responsible for some of the original bridges in the docks themselves, particularly a swing bridge that was built in 1828. St Katherine’s Docks was Telford’s only London project but that didn’t stop him from being a regular in a Coffee House near (what is now) Trafalgar Square. For many years Telford drank coffee in the Salopian Coffee House (most likely in Spring Gardens, just behind Cockspur St). This was where he stayed when in London and, as he was a famous engineer by that point, he started to attract crowds of engineers and admirers to the Salopian in the hope of meeting him. So important was Telford to the business of this central London coffee house that, when he left to live in Abingdon St, the new landlord of the Salopian complained to him “What, leave the house? Why sir, I have just paid £750 for you!”.

Fortunately, White Mulberries has far more to attract customers to it than one illustrious coffee drinker, though perhaps it has those as well.

 

White Mulberries is at St Katherine’s Docks, E1W 1AT,

A good book on bridges is: “Bridges – the science and art of the world’s most inspiring structures”, David Blockley, Oxford University Press (2010)

Coffee House anecdotes from “London Coffee Houses”, Bryant Lillywhite (1963)

Categories
Coffee cup science General Observations slow

Coffee & Contrails (II)

vortices in coffee
Vortices forming behind a tea spoon being dragged through coffee.

Drag a tea spoon through your cup of coffee (or tea). Start by dragging the spoon slowly, then faster. Initially, the coffee flows around the spoon smoothly then, as you speed up, small vortices appear at either side of the spoon. Pull the spoon out of the coffee, and the vortices continue to move together through the cup before bouncing off the sides. Such vortices form whenever there is a speed difference between two layers of fluid (gas or liquid), as there is around the spoon being dragged through coffee. It is this effect that is the second connection between the physics of coffee and contrails.

Of course it is not giant tea spoons in the air but aeroplanes. Behind each aeroplane is a series of vortices trailing behind the wings. These vortices do not (normally) cause the contrails, the reason that they form was discussed in Coffee & Contrails (I). However, the vortices do cause some interesting effects in the contrail that we can, occasionally, see.

wake vortex, contrail, coffee in the sky
In this contrail there is a set of protuberances at regular intervals along the lower edge.

As the plane moves through the air, the speed of the air going over the wing is greater than the speed of air under the wing. As well as leading to vortices forming behind the wing, this speed difference results in an air pressure difference (the air pressure under the wing is greater than the air pressure above the wing). The pressure difference (below and above the wing) pushes the plane upwards, or, perhaps more technically, ‘creates lift’ and enables the plane to fly. If you want a good demonstration of the fact that a higher air speed leads to a lower air pressure, get two pieces of flat A4 paper and hold them in front of you such that you are looking through the small gap between them. Now blow into the gap separating the two sheets; they will join together. The reason that they do this is that the air pressure for fast moving air (as you blow) is less than the air pressure for static air (around the paper) and so the difference in air pressure pushes the two sheets together.

Shadowy contrail
Look carefully for another interesting contrail optical effect. There are two contrails here, an obvious one cutting straight down the photo and a second contrail moving more horizontally across the photograph. The second contrail can be seen more clearly by its shadow.

On a clear day, if the air in the higher atmosphere is relatively humid, you will see lots of persistent contrails. These contrails last for a long time in the skies and can drift with the wind. Occasionally at the edge of such a contrail you will see regular protrusions from the contrail, almost as if waves are forming on the contrail and producing white horses in the sky (see picture above). Initially I had hoped that this was a manifestation of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability however the actual explanation is still quite fascinating. It seems that these protrusions are the result of the “wake vortices“, the vortices that form behind a plane just as the coffee forms vortices behind your spoon. I find it quite impressive to realise that high in the sky, these contrails are showing us that the atmosphere behaves just as if it were a cup of coffee. A definite case for which a coffee is a telescope for viewing the world.

Please leave any comments in the comments box below. If you think of any other connections between the physics of coffee and contrails please share them either here or on my Facebook page.

Categories
Coffee review Coffee Roasters Observations Science history slow

Wonders of the World at Espresso Base, Bloomsbury

Hasten coffee, long black, black coffee, espresso base
‘Has Bean’ coffee at Espresso Base

Espresso Base is exactly the sort of café that you want to make sure that you know about, but part of you is selfishly quite happy if not too many others do. It is not that the the place is small, far from it. There is plenty of space in the courtyard at Espresso Base, beside St George’s Church, to sit and enjoy your coffee. The thing is, it is great to have the place almost entirely to yourself. With few others around, the oasis-like quality of the place is emphasised, astonishing as it is so close to the busy Bloomsbury Way. Only this oasis serves great coffee. Their coffee is roasted by Has Bean, which I admit is the reason that I first dropped into Espresso Base a few weeks ago. The black coffee that I had was certainly very good and the environment in which to enjoy the coffee was thought provoking which, for me, is an important aspect of any café. Cafés need to be places that you can go, slow down and notice things and Espresso Base certainly falls into that group of cafés that I would highly recommend both for the coffee and the café.

stone recycling, slate, slate waterfall, geology
The purple slate waterfall feature in the courtyard area at Espresso Base. You can just see the stone with the rectangular holes carved into it at the bottom of the wall.

On the day that we arrived, it had been raining. For a café with seating outside this may have posed a problem but the chairs had been thoughtfully folded so that they remained dry. The rain had however seeped into some of the paving slabs around the chairs and so that was the first thing to notice, the fact that many objects when wet appear darker, why? Opposite our seating was a rock feature that to me looked like a waterfall made out of slate, the slate had a purple tinge which again, had been made slightly more purple by the rain. Below the slate ‘waterfall’ and forming a wall, were a series of stones that had clearly been taken here from somewhere else. I say ‘clearly’, because the stone at the bottom had two holes that had been carved out of it, one square, one slightly more rectangular. Presumably the stone had been used as part of a gate post in the past and yet there is no evidence of the remains of a gate on the other side of the courtyard (I think that a gate post would have to be deeper than the square indent in the paving slab that is at the other side of the courtyard). It is therefore more likely that the stone had been used somewhere else beforehand and ‘recycled’ for use in this wall. This juxtaposition of slate above and recycled stone below reminded me of the early geologists and how they identified the Great Glen fault that runs through Loch Ness in Scotland. Slate is a metamorphic rock, meaning that it has undergone changes due to the high pressure and temperatures within the Earth. Slate is however quite a low-grade metamorphic rock so, compared with higher grade metamorphic rocks, it has not been subjected to that much pressure or that much temperature. By mapping the lower grade and higher grade metamorphic rocks along the Great Glen, the early geologists noticed a line that sharply separated the metamorphic rock types. This fault would have, in the past, caused earthquakes as the ground slipped along the fault.

Replica of Mausoleum of Halicarnassus
The steeple of St George’s church, Bloomsbury Way. The statue on top is of King George I rather than King Mausolus in  his chariot. The statue of Mausolus, his wife/sister Artemisia and a horse from his chariot can be seen in the British Museum.

On leaving Espresso Base I turned and looked up at the church. If you get a chance, take a look at the steeple. Particularly ornate, the stepped steeple is apparently built to the description of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus by Pliny the Elder. This monument was one of the seven wonders of the Ancient World and was built to be the burial chamber of King Mausolus of Karia. Described as standing approximately 40 m in height, this massive stepped, marble pyramid stood on top of 36 columns surrounded by statues. Topping the pyramid was a statue of King Mausolus himself, in a chariot. This ancient wonder is thought to have been destroyed by an earthquake in the fourteenth century after which the stones were ‘recycled’ by the Knights of Malta to build a fortress. A history that is aptly mirrored in the geology and stone recycling evident in the courtyard of Espresso Base.

 

Espresso Base can be found in the courtyard of St George’s church, Bloomsbury Way, WC1A 2SE

Artefacts from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus can be seen in room 21 of the British Museum (conveniently just around the corner from Espresso Base).

Geology help from: “Geology Today, Understanding our planet”, Murck/Skinner, John Wiley & Sons, 1999