My office usually looks like the interior of Dennis Rodman’s mind: a tumultuous storm of dark horrors. I generally am embarrassed to have people see the un-businesslike setting in which I conduct my business. I instruct the FedEx driver to leave my packages outside the office door and run away.
But now, thanks to my new hero, University of Chicago physics professor Sydney Nagel, I want the world to see my messes.
The university announced last week that Nagel has discovered why coffee spilled onto a table or counter leaves a ring.
Several years ago, Nagel took note of the rings left by coffee he had spilled on his desk, days — if not weeks — earlier. He wondered about this phenomenon of ring formation. He then searched “the literature” concerning the physical processes underlying coffee rings, only to find that there was none. He quizzed his colleagues for possible explanations. Many were offered and all proved wrong. He asked visiting scientists for knowledge or theories about the phenomenon, and when they stopped laughing they confessed no knowledge and offered more incorrect theories. Finally, this year, a female undergraduate discovered that the key process is evaporation. From that discovery emerged a unified coffee ring formation theory.
Ring formation actually turns out to be a combination of factors: Any surface roughness “pins” the edge of the drop, preventing it from spreading. Evaporation at the edges pulls more liquid — and suspended solids — out to the edge from the center. The flow causes the material to pile up at the edges, where it eventually dries and forms a ring.
Nagel’s discovery may have money-making implications. Any material suspended in water (or any other liquid) will be drawn into a ring. If, instead of coffee, metal were mixed with a liquid it might form a fine wire that could have numerous commercial applications.
One wonderful thing about Nagel is that so far as anyone knows, in the thousands of years humans have drunk coffee, not a single soul has ever investigated, in a systematic way, why it leaves a ring. Truth be told, there is no record of anyone ever having asked the question. Nagel looked at the wholly mundane, old spilt coffee, with better eyes than anyone ever had. He showed there is grand wonder and elegant physics in the drearily common.
Nagel is what the Buddhists have always said we should be: awake. Rather than wipe up an annoying stain, he honored it by focusing his intellect on and interrogating it. His curiosity overcame habit and convention.
The other wonderful thing Nagel did was show the absolute utility of sloppiness. Now, millions of us, instead of being reviled as slobs must be honored as researchers. Now, rather than keep judging eyes out of my messy office, I will invite the ignorant into my lab.
In support of Dr. Nagel’s work, I am currently studying the behavior of coffee rings that remain on a desk over a period of years. Other opportunities await in the refrigerator, wherein dwell alien life forms that would send the Mars Pathfinder’s alpha proton X-ray spectrometer onto particle arrest; the boxes of half-eaten bagel-and-cream-cheese sandwiches are part of a long-term study of biodiversity within enclosed ecosystems. And, of course, the design of the office is intended as a demonstration of chaos theory.
So the next time my wife complains that I should wash the dishes, rake the leaves or even take out the trash, I shall with deep seriousness declare, “I’d love to, honey, but as a scientist . . .”
The web site to view professor Sidney Nagel’s coffee stains and read about his research is: http://www-news.uchicago.edu/docs/10.22.97-CoffeeStains.html
