Summer will soon be over in the northern hemisphere, but we still have a few weeks left to enjoying a cold drink around the barbeque. Years ago, an engineering-student friend of mine said that his fellow engineers had done some experiments to find the fastest way to chill a tepid bottle of beer using ice. Their solution was immersion in ice water, which made sense to me given the very high heat capacity of liquid water.
Now, two physicists at the University of Warsaw have created a chilled drinks calculator that will tell you how to get your beverage of choice to the perfect temperature using a fridge, freezer, ice bath or even a windowsill.
If you a keen to chill a 500 ml bottle of beer from room temperature to 3 °C you could put it in the freezer for 80 min – the calculator reveals. Chilling a room-temperature bottle of white wine in the fridge to an optimal temperature of 10 °C, on the other hand, would take 2.5 h.
Cool physics
Álvaro Díez and Tibor Pal also provide a wealth of information about the physics of cooling on the calculator website.
Now that your drinks are chilling nicely, it is time to fire-up the barbeque and cook a steak or two. Before you plop that expensive cut onto the grill, you might want to consult “A mathematical model for meat cooking” by Hala Shehadeh of the University of Florida and colleagues.
Cocktail physics
“We present an accurate two-dimensional mathematical model for steak cooking based on Flory-Rehner theory,” writes the team. “The model treats meat as a poroelastic medium saturated with fluid”. Not very appetising, but will it produce the perfect steak?
Finally, and completed unrelated to food, drink or summer, the folks at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics have produced a series of physics-related screensavers that you can download to your device. These include several chalkboard images by the Canadian artist ChalkMaster Dave Johnston (no relation).
