On the 11th June, 2019 that is, in just under two weeks, we are going to try something exciting. Amoret Coffee in Notting Hill has offered to host the first ever “Bean Thinking’s evening of coffee & science”.
The idea behind what will (hopefully) become a series of evenings is to host a space for discussion and observation, exploring the physics within a coffee cup. On the 11th, we’ll be looking particularly at the phenomenon of “walking” droplets of coffee. These droplets can move across the surface of a cup of coffee and exist for many minutes (even days) if the conditions are right. And the conditions are fairly easy to create: we’ll be creating several such ‘walkers’ in the spacious upstairs area of Amoret’s Notting Hill branch that people can play with.
Although it takes the creation of certain conditions to achieve long-lasting droplets, you can often see them as you prepare a V60 pour over or even when dragging your (single-use) take-away cup over the surface of a table to create resonances on the surface of the cup. They crop up quite frequently, but why are they there at all and why do some last longer than others?
In addition to exploring these questions experimentally, we’ll also be discussing why these droplets sometimes ‘walk’ across the surface of the coffee and how this relates to an early interpretation of the phenomenon of wave-particle duality in quantum physics. How does something that you can sometimes see while brewing your coffee in the morning relate to the idea that fundamental particles such as the electron behave both as particle and wave? And what does this mean anyway?
It is hoped that future evenings will cover other topics such as climate change and coffee stains, I also hope that we will be lucky enough to have some of the coffee farmers that Amoret has direct-trade relationships with in order to explore these connections further. But, that is in the future, this time we are sticking with the fundamentals!
So, if you are in London on the 11th June and would like to explore some physics in your coffee (or some coffee with your physics), please do come along to Amoret, from 5pm, for an evening of conversation and poring over science. We will be keeping people informed of plans for the evening (and for future evenings) via our events mailing list which you can sign up to here, or you can follow our progress on our Facebook events page here. Meanwhile, it would be helpful for planning reasons if you could let us know if you are coming either by signing up on Facebook or by emailing us. Looking forward to meeting some of you on the 11th.