The belief is widespread that the sandwich most often drops with oil down. We decided to find out how much this is true.

The mention of the so -called sandwich law can be found not only in oral stories, but in the media and in fiction. The expression is found, for example, in diaries Geologist Boris Vronsky for 1945: “According to the law of cosmic bastard, it is also the law of a sandwich, which falls on the floor with the side on which the oil is located, soon after our departure will arrive a boat.” There is a sandwich law in Lyubov Kabo's novel "The peers of October"(1964), and in the essay of Daniil Granin"A month upside down"(1966). The rule of the inevitable fall of the sandwich with oil down is explained in detail on entertainment sites, such as "Favorites", Or in"Evening Moscow".

The law of a sandwich is most often defined as a special case of the so-called Murphy law, which is formulated as follows: "If something may go wrong, it will go wrong." This is not a strict postulate, but rather a playful explanation of the injustice of the world order. Nevertheless, the statement about the inevitable turning of the sandwich when falling acquired a type of stable expression.

The Law of the sandwich has repeatedly attracted the attention of scientists and journalists who conducted experiments and painted physical formulas. Let us dwell first on practical experiments. The most famous is one of the releases of the program "Destroyers of myths»On the Discovery TV channel. The presenters dropped and threw fried toasts smeared with oil, and came to the following conclusion: if the sandwiches are tossed, then the falls with oil down and oil up are distributed approximately equally; If they are dropped from the edge of the table, then the bread will more often fall with oil down. A similar experiment was conducted by the Air Force journalists - in the Qed program, they threw toasts with butter into the air and came to the same conclusions.

In 1995, European Journal of Physics Published The first fundamental study on this topic. Physicist Robert Matthews from Aston University in the UK developed a formula for falling bread with butter.

Matthew drew attention to the need to exclude the practice of tossing sandwiches into the air as not related to reality. His research is limited to the simplest and most common situation: the fall of the sandwich from the edge of the table. The British scientist demonstrated on the schemes: provided that the bread initially lies on the table with oil up, the sandwich, as a rule, does not have time to make a complete revolution when falling. Thus, the oil is below. Matthewn received a comic Shnobel Prize in 1996 for this opening, but his article still continues to quote in serious scientific publications. Almost simultaneously with the Matthew to similar conclusions Came His American colleague Darill Steins.

Subsequently, the Matthew's formula was repeatedly supplemented, but no one questioned her. So, the physicist Michael Bacon drew attention to the dependence of the rotation of the falling sandwich on the thickness of the oil layer. But, as follows from his work, published in the American Journal of Physics in 2001, the thick layer of oil only increases the likelihood of a sandwich falling unwanted side.

Further, the Australian physicist Rod Cross from the Sydney University came. His study was Published In the European Journal of Physics in March 2022. Cross drew attention to the fact that Matthews and most of his colleagues considered only one possible situation of fall: a piece of bread of standard thickness fell from the rectangular edge of the table. Australian scientist Offered To study other situations that he divided into four types: the fall of a thick rectangular bar (instead of which we can imagine a piece of bread) from a rounded surface, a thin bar from a rectangular surface, a thick block from a rectangular surface and, finally, a standard bar from a rectangular surface, but the bar is moved forward.

As the cross established, the rate of fall and rotation of each of the bars differed depending on their thickness, on the edge of the surface and on friction. But if we consider this study from the point of view of the sandwich, then the answer here remains the same: when falling from a height of about 70 cm, the borks turned over.

Thus, scientists have proved that when falling from the table, a sandwich is indeed in most cases, it falls with oil down if it initially lies up. But this is true only in relation to the usual household situation. When tossing the sandwich, the results may be others high in the air or throwing it into the wall.

Body image: Wikimedia Commons

Most of the truth

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