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Opposition at Antipode, Hammersmith

Antipode coffee Hammersmith
Outside Antipode, Hammersmith.

At the end of Fulham Palace Road, just next to the Hammersmith gyratory is Antipode, an Australian influenced (the clues to this are not so subtle) cafe. In truth, I have been to Antipode a few times now but not to take time to properly take it in. Once was after a tricky teaching session where it was difficult to sit back and reflect on anything but what had happened in the previous few hours, another time I was talking to someone rather than taking time to think about the location. There seems an urgent need for us now to take some time out and think about where we are and what we think. Indeed, part of the point of Bean Thinking is to explore how this space to ponder can be found in any cafe, if we but pause to look. Would this visit to Antipode be different?

Outside the cafe, a few tables were arranged so that you can enjoy your coffee in the open, next to the glass front window. Strangely the chairs/stools for these tables were stacked inside, possibly because it had become chilly again after a brief warm spell earlier in the year. A picture of a takeaway cup was drawn on the window as if to emphasise what you may expect to find inside, reminiscent of the old signs advertising coffee houses of the past. Going in, the counter is on the right and, while there was a selection of cakes etc. I opted to stick with the long black that afternoon. A seating area is at the back of the cafe where there are about 4 separated tables with a bench seat running along behind them with a fifth table along the rear wall.

Coffee at Antipode, pink salt, brown sugar, reflections and shadows. And a hint as to Bean Thinking
Coffee, salt and sugar. What do you see?
The coffee was drinkably fruity. More apples and redcurrants to my palette. On the table behind my coffee was a jar of pink salt and another of brown sugar. Which got me thinking about crystal structures and how it is often impurity, rather than purity that gives precious stones their colour. Is there a metaphor there?
 
But a second effect jolted to my attention. Someone sat down on the bench seat just along from me and as she sat down so I went up: a little see-saw. Across the room from me was a picture which, somewhat strangely, had two picture hooks either side of it, almost balancing each other on an imaginary line across the frame. Behind the table adjacent to me was a picture with a caption, to the effect of there being a very thin line between love and hate. Was this another instance of balance and equivalence?

Balance is something that we use in physics a lot, from the balance of forces to the use of balances in experiments. The imminent redefinition of the unit of the kilogram is based on a balance of forces. In the new definition, a balance is used so that the gravitational force pulling a mass down will be perfectly balanced by an electrically induced magnetic field pushing the mass up. The redefinition means that to calibrate 1Kg, scientists will no longer have to compare their 1Kg mass to the mass of a lump of platinum-iridium kept in Paris. The redefined kilogram will instead be calibrated based on its relation to Planck’s constant. This means that any lab around the world can calibrate the kg, they do not have to rely on copies of the mass kept in Paris.

Victoria Regina: What changes have happened since this post box was installed here in Hammersmith? What changes will do so before it is finally retired?
Victoria Regina: What changes have happened since this post box was installed here in Hammersmith? What changes will do so before it is finally retired?

The redefinition of the kg is going to happen on 20 May, 2019 (world metrology day). On a day to day basis, it probably will not affect many of us that much. Our 20g of coffee measured out to brew our morning coffee is going to be, to all intents and purposes, the same 20g as we would have measured on the 19 May 2019. Nonetheless, the changes are important not just for the metrology community but also for the way that we do science. In the past, all of our units were related to fixed, physical objects. The metre was defined by the length of a metal rod, the second was originally defined as being 1/86400 of the mean solar day and the kilogram by the aforementioned lump of PtIr in Paris. The kg was the last of the units to still be defined by a unique physical object. As of 20 May 2019, each of these units will be related to physical constants meaning that at no point will we have to go to a lab elsewhere and check that my kg is the same as your kg.

As I left Antipode, I noticed the post box just outside with “VR” on it. The post box has been there since the time of Queen Victoria. How things have changed since scientists wrote to each other with news of their latest experiments, scientific papers were posted to journals and measured lengths were compared to a physical ‘metre’ long metal rod! How things change as we move ever faster emailing results around and tweeting our latest news. We are, in 2019, moving from calibrations based on weighing physical objects to measuring the balance relative to physical constants that were just being discovered at the point that post box first came into service. And yet we humans don’t change much. We still need time to ponder balance from false balance, equivalence from false equivalence. It is not a contradiction to say that it is urgent that we find a way of pausing and reflecting on some very weighty issues.

Antipode is at 28 Fulham Palace Road, W6 9PH

Categories
Coffee cup science Observations

A shocking coffee connection

There have been some fantastic thunderstorms in London lately. Perhaps nothing to rival thunderstorms in the tropics but for this region of the world they were quite impressive. One lightning storm in particular came very close. Thank goodness for lightning conductors! Perhaps the connection between lightning storms and coffee is not obvious. But maybe this is because you mop up your coffee spillages too quickly.

Reynolds, rain, waves, pond, raining
There are so many coffee-physics connections with rain and weather. It’s worth looking out for more.

The link is in the mess and the maths. It turns out that the maths describing water evaporating out of a drying coffee droplet is the same, in one crucial detail, as the maths describing the electric fields around a lightning conductor. If we want to see why this may be, we need to get a little bit messy and spill some coffee.

The question is how do coffee rings form? We know that to start with the solids in the coffee are distributed fairly evenly throughout the drink. It is the same when you spill it, initially a spilled drop of coffee looks like, well, coffee. But if you wait as this spilled coffee dries, you will find that a ring starts to form around the edge of the drop. How? How does a uniform coffee distribution when the drop is first spilled become a ring of coffee solids around the edge of the dried drop?

coffee ring, ink jet printing, organic electronics
Why does it form a ring?

A number of different aspects of physics feed into this problem but the one that is relevant to the lightning conductors concerns how the water in the drop evaporates. If you think about how a water molecule escapes (evaporates from) the droplet, it is not going to go shooting off like a rocket blasted out from the drop. Instead it will take a step out the drop then encounter a molecule in the air and get deflected to a slightly different path and again, and again, and so on. It follows the same sort of “random walk” that we know that the bits of dust on a coffee surface follow (and the same sort of random walk that provides a link between coffee and the movements of the financial stock exchange but that is a whole other topic).

Now think about the shape of that spilled coffee drop. If a water molecule were to evaporate from the top of the dome of the drop, it has a certain probability of escaping but it also, because its path is random, has a certain probability of re-entering the droplet. A water molecule at the edge of the droplet however will have a lower probability of re-entering the droplet purely on the basis that there isn’t so much of the droplet around it. Over many molecules and many ‘escape attempts’, this lower probability of re-absorption will translate to a higher flux of water molecules evaporating from the droplet at the edges. The water will evaporate ‘more quickly’ from the edge of the droplet than from the top of it.

artemisdraws, evaporating droplet
As the water molecules leave the droplet, they are more likely to escape if they are at the edge than if they are at the top. Image © @artemisworks

When this is written mathematically, the rate of evaporating water is related to the contact angle between the drop and the surface. The shallower the angle, the higher the rate of evaporation or equivalently, the greater the ‘flux’. It is this mathematical expression that is the same as for the lightning conductor if, rather than refer to an evaporating water flux we refer to an electric field. So the more pointy the conductor, the greater the field concentration around it. A shocking example of the idea that everything is connected.

Of course, there is much more to the coffee ring than this with physics that relates coffee rings to bacterial colonies, burning cigarette papers and soap boats. If you are interested, you can read more about how coffee rings form (including why a higher evaporation rate helps lead to a coffee ring effect) here. If on the other hand you want some well justified thinking time, go spill some coffee and watch as the coffee dries.

Categories
Coffee review Observations slow

Constructive interference at Frequency, Kings Cross

exterior of Frequency Kings Cross
Note the tiles. Frequency, Kings Cross on a rainy day.

It was a rainy afternoon when we ventured to Kings Cross and into Frequency. Suggested by the London’s Best Coffee App as the closest café to our then location, we made our way through puddles and rain onto Kings Cross Road. At that point, a brain-freeze meant that we couldn’t see where Frequency should be. The map on the app was implying that we were extremely close but there didn’t seem to be a café around. Then we saw it in front of us! The striking black and white tiling on the floor somehow hiding this shop-front from view.

The tables inside matched the tiling outside. Black and white triangles meeting at a point. My long black (from Workshop) was placed close to the intersection of these triangles. The coffee arrived in a mug, more cylindrical than standard coffee cups and so closer to mathematical models of coffee cups that are used in explanations of convection and rotation in the cups. An interesting change of aesthetic that also changes the internal dynamics of the coffee. A nice touch was that the mugs were also coordinated with the tiling, though to be fair I hadn’t noticed that at the time.

The coffee itself was extremely fruity, a lovely warming brew to enjoy while watching the rain outside. The interior of the café meanwhile was decorated with a lot of wood around together with a couple of music stands. Perhaps the music stands make sense in a café named Frequency. Indeed, according to the review on London’s Best Coffee (or as it is now known, Best Coffee), there are plans to build a music recording studio here as well as having live musical performances. However, also mentioned in that review was the fact that this café had been designed and built from scratch with the help only of online tutorials. Which makes a particularly resonant connection with something I noticed here.

mug of coffee at Frequency
Coffee at Frequency.

What caught my eye as I contemplated this café was the one bit of bright colour on the ceiling. It was also something that hints at problems that can crop up when you design and build your own electrical circuits: Parallel wires (in this case leading to the lightbulbs). Perhaps in the café, these were intended to represent music staves, certainly that would fit in the theme. However to an experimental physicist who dabbles in designing pieces of kit for electrical measurements, these parallel lines leading to a light mean something entirely different.

They mean noise.

When you are designing a piece of electrical equipment to be used for measuring voltages across an unknown material, there often ends up being a lot of wiring in the probe as well as the bit at the end of the instrument that you are actually interested in. Some of this has a practical purpose. Often we want to measure something when it is very cold so it has to be on the end of a metal rod that is inserted into a vat of liquid nitrogen or helium or that is held in a strong magnetic field. When designing the probe, the bits of wire leading to the interesting bit at the end of the rod can be almost as important to consider as the measuring bit itself.

To see why, perhaps you remember putting compasses around a wire carrying an electric current? As the electric current is switched on, the compass needles move indicating that the electrical current generates a magnetic field. The basis of electric motors and dynamos, the idea is that an electrical current will generate a magnetic field and a moving magnetic field would generate an electrical current.

transmission lines, electrical noise
The wires to the light bulbs in Frequency Kings Cross. Memories of transmission line lab experiments.

Now, imagine two parallel wires each carrying an electrical current. Both of them will produce a magnetic field, but if there is a varying current in one or other of the wires, the magnetic field will also be varying. And if there’s a varying magnetic field, it can induce a current in the neighbouring wire. In this way, electrical noise on one of the wires can be transmitted to the other.

Such electrical noise can be inconvenient if we are trying to speak on the phone and just hear a ‘hiss’, or if we are trying to listen to the radio and just can’t tune in. It could also be more problematic, imagine if there was a lot of electric noise on a machine measuring the electrical activity of your heart, an ECG. Consequently, there are whole books written on how to reduce electrical noise pick up. However one simple way to reduce a lot of the noise is to get rid of those parallel lines the like of which are on the ceiling at Frequency by twisting them together. The ‘twisted pair’ is a great way of making more sensitive electrical measurements. And if you wanted to reduce the noise further, you can shield the twisted pair with another conductor and ground (or earth) it.

The twisted pair works by reducing the magnetic coupling between the two wires. Of course, it may not be quite as immediately aesthetically pleasing as parallel wires on a ceiling but there is something quite elegant about a well made and shielded twisted pair properly grounded in an electrical circuit. And when you put everything together, ground it properly and see the noise from the electrical mains (at 50Hz) disappear, there is a certain pleasing effect from that too.

Café design as a clue to electrical design. Frequency can be found at 121 Kings Cross Road, WC1X