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SCMP Reporter

A HAND reaches. A plate slips.

  A slice of toast takes flight, slowly rotating as gravity steadily impels it toward an expensive Oriental carpet.

  How will this tale end? With a relieved sigh? Or with a home tragically scarred by an ugly carpet stain?   Better call the Rug Doctor, says Robert Matthews.

   A few simple calculations demonstrate that falling toast really does tend to land butter-side down, he writes in last month's issue of the European Journal of Physics.

  It is not an instability generated by the weight of the butter that does it, or a change in air resistance on the greasy side.

   It is a law of the universe, says Mr Matthews, a visiting research fellow in the computer science department at Aston University in Britain.

  More specifically, the inevitability of a buttered carpet incident results from fundamental physical laws.

   Mr Matthews found this by treating the falling toast problem like a simple high-school physics problem, accounting for all of the forces that act on a slice of bread as it slips off a plate or table and falls to the floor.

  He found that when toast slips off a table, it drops over the edge with a slight torque, or spin.

   For a table of average height - less than a metre - the toast, with its butter side up, turns about enough to bring the butter side down at the moment it hits the floor.

  'In a broad range of realistic circumstances, the dynamics do lead to an inevitable butter-down final state,' Mr Matthews writes.



Falling toast lands under spell of physics