The Physics Of Making Someone's Beer Foam Over
Tapped Beer Acts Like This Cold mud pots in Fort Bragg, California Mendo Mann on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 I had actually never seen this before, but maybe that's because I don't hang out with jerks? In any case, apparently if you hit someone's open beer bottle firmly at its mouth, it will foam up and over immediately. NPR's The Salt has a helpful gif. The Salt also talked with a physicist, Javier Rodriguez Rodriguez of Carlos III University in Madrid, who's discovered why this happens. Rodriguez and two colleagues filmed tapped beer with high-speed cameras to uncover the physics of the foam explosion. They even presented their work this weekend at a meeting of the American Physical Society (the fluid dynamics division, naturally). The Salt has the breakdown, using...