If you put water in a mug, sit the mug on a flat surface, and give it a bit of a push, the water will start to slosh from side to side. On the scientific side of things, we have this: It’s the sloshing that slows her down, every brisk step compounding the problem. Czerski, however, keeps wanting to juxtapose the words “tea” and “brisk,” and I find myself cheering at the conundrum she faces when trying to walk briskly back to her office after steeping her afternoon tea in an oversized mug. It’s not the same as pulling a tea bag from my backpack and dispensing hot water from a carafe over it in a paper cup.

Give me the chance to feel the leaves between my fingers while the kettle heats up, let me hold the tea basket under my nose and breathe in a little bit. This makes speed-tea consumption unappealing to me. I am more fond of the rituals surrounding tea than I am of the tea itself (though I am indeed fond of the tea as well). Many of us, Czerski included, relish a break for afternoon tea. But quite often you get a different result.” Time is also a factor in controlling the speed of the flow of a thing, as one might try to with a dam, or even with something as small as a cup of tea. If you do something at twice the speed, sometimes you get the same result in half the time. The trick, I guess, if you want to use ketchup, is to “hold the bottle at an angle and tap the neck.” Then, only the ketchup in the neck behaves like it’s a liquid, and the amount that comes out is controlled.Īll that to say, Czerski tell us, “Time is important in the physical world, because the speed at which things happen matters. Shake it up really fast, the molecules untangle and ketchup (which is apparently easily persuaded) starts to believe it’s a liquid again, and it goes rushing out of the bottle. These bacteria-raised chains get themselves “slightly tangled up with similar chains” and together they keep the ketchup believing it’s a solid and staying firmly in place. This substance is a handful of molecules “made up of a chain of linked sugars.” Before you get excited over how delightful that sounds, keep in mind xanthan gum has its origins in bacteria, and get yourself back behind the protective Kindle screen. So when ketchup-which is otherwise “mostly sieved tomatoes, jazzed up by vinegar and spices”-is bottled, a tiny percentage of its content is composed of xanthan gum. It’s also to ensure the coating applied to fries and other foods eaten with ketchup is thick, and not runny. Ketchup is made to be thick, she says, in part to keep the spices that give it whatever flavor it lays claim to from settling to the bottom. But also on the rest of the food on the plate, the plate where there was no food, the table the plate is sitting on, and after a particularly vigorous fight with the ketchup, on everyone else’s plate and maybe even in their water glasses.Ĭzerski explains the reason ketchup clutches the sides of the bottle like a child’s fingers wrap around the doorway leading into the dentist’s office is viscosity, a word that is so much more elegant than gloop, even if it means to come to the same end. On the food that was its intended target, sure. And when they succeed, ketchup splatters. They slide a knife up inside the neck as though there’s a ketchup plug needing to be punched through. They whack the bottom of the bottle with their palm. And that would be fine if not for the fact that most folks aren’t inclined to let it go at that.

My fraught relationship with ketchup stems at least in part from the issues Helen Czerksi discusses in chapter 4 of Storm in a Teacup: the stuff doesn’t come out of the bottle. Let’s all let Jim, our trusty assistant, take the risk of contact with various slow-moving substances. When the references to slime and the m-word (that slick trail which-shall-not-be-named along which a snail pulls itself) came into focus, it was good to be able to say like, Marlon Perkins on Wild Kingdom, that I was watching from the safety of my desk behind the glass screen. By the time the word gloop oozed into the text for the first of too many appearances, I was happy to be reading via Kindle. It began with a condiment I’ll normally go to great lengths to evade (probably outpaced only by mayonnaise). I suspected early on that this chapter may not be my favorite. Editor’s Note: This post is the second in a three-part book club discussion of Helen Czerski’s Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life.

Storm in a tea cup book