1. Does Toast Always Land Buttered Side Down?

That is the question to be addressed in this blog. My posts will be a series of "lab book" entries as I explore the Buttered Side Down Phenomenon. By the time I finish, I hope to have addressed a variety of topics regarding Tumbling Toast, and maybe even generate publication-worthy results addressing humankind's age-old question about how breakfast is ruined.

Some people dismiss the Buttered Side Down Phenomenon as pessimism or the selective generation of memories following a Ruined Breakfast. Others have suggested otherwise, and attempted to prove it. These vary from the facetious study mentioned here, to the serious attempt by Matthews that inspired my interest in the Buttered Side Down Phenomenon. More recently, the BBC's H2G2 published an accurate, if opaque, explanation. In this study I intend to bridge the gap between Matthews' rigor and H2G2's web-based discussion.

A study "busting" the Buttery Landing Hypothesis was published by the quasi-experimental geniuses (experimental quasi-geniuses?) at Mythbusters, who catapulted toast through the air and found that it landed on the Buttery Side randomly, i.e. approximately half of the time. Yet, they admitted that when toast topples from a table it does tend to land upside down. Thus the subtleties of H2G2's and Matthews' arguments became yet another victim to the spectacle that is television, which unjustly focused on the unusual phenomenon of Violently Hurled Toast.

There is nothing magical about toast that draws The Buttery Side to the ground, but it does fall in a very particular way. Most people hold their toast or put it on the table Buttered Side Up. Also, with some notable cinematic exceptions, breakfast tends to be a low-energy environment, tending not to produce High Kinetic Energy Bread. Thus, Tumbling Toast most likely falls gently from about tabletop or mouth height, generally starting with the Buttery Side up. These observations are what physicists call the Initial Conditions, the starting point for theoretical predictions and the way experimental studies are prepared. In the posts that follow, I will begin exploring the consequences of The Initial Conditions.