Recent research published in Communications Physics reveals that hen's eggs withstand falls better when landing horizontally rather than vertically. The study by MIT's Tal Cohen involved dropping eggs 180 times from various heights, demonstrating a lower break rate for horizontally landing eggs. This contradicts the common assumption based on static tests, showing that dynamic scenarios differ significantly. The study highlights the pitfalls of relying on common sense in scientific education, calling for more precise language and understanding of specific conditions for materials like egg shells.
Through hundreds of experiments and a set of static and dynamic simulations, we demonstrate a statistically significant decrease in the likelihood that an egg breaks when oriented horizontally as opposed to vertically, and offer a concrete and intuitive explanation as to why this is the case.
These results and the associated analysis demonstrate the importance of specificity of language and the dangers of appealing to 'common sense' in the physics classroom while having wide-ranging implications due to the ubiquity of shell structures in nature and in the man-made world.
MIT associate professor Tal Cohen and her colleagues dropped eggs 180 times from three different heights - 8, 9, and 10 mm - onto a hard surface. They observed that on average, eggs dropped vertically broke at lower drop heights.
The researchers also compiled a list of AI responses, YouTube videos, and online articles that repeated the now-debunked claim that eggs are more robust when they land end down.
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