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New Scientist is happy to announce that they’re baffled by a phenomenon reported by one of their readers:
QuestionA lively discussion follows, but as far as I know there’s still no answer to the question. A bottle of Tia Maria is offered as a prize.One of the recommended ways of drinking the liqueur Tia Maria is to sip it through a thin layer of cream. If the cream is poured onto the surface of the drink, to a depth of about 2 millimetres, and left to stand for about two minutes, the surface begins to break up into a number of toroidal cells. These cells develop a rapid circulation pattern which continues even if some of the Tia Maria is sipped through the cream. How and why do these cells develop and what is the energy source? (Geoffrey Sherlock, Amersham Buckinghamshire)
Answers
This is a truly astonishing effect for which not a single reader has produced an explanation. “Rapid circulation pattern” does not do justice to the series of eruptions that convulse the surface of the cream as the liqueur bursts through from beneath…
The title of this post is an excuse to quote from “The St. Stephen’s Day Murders” by Elvis Costello—
There’ll be laughter and tears over Tia Marias,—a song I admire (in part) for its distinctly local rhymes and content. There’s no other connection; it’s just for fun. (via the Viridian list)
Mixed up with that drink made from girders…
I was giggling and thinking about forwarding this to my favorite physicist to see if he has an explanation. I clicked to see who'd already gotten a comment in. I should have known. Let us know your results John and maybe we can do further research in the Boskone bar.
MKK
I hope this works with heavy cream, because that's all I've got in the fridge right now....
Mary Kay,
Will do. BTW, I could've sworn this post was originally on PNH's end of the blog...or was I hallucinating?
Speaking of Boskone, who's coming? And is there a regular time people are getting together outside the formal circles for drinks, etc?
That sounds serious, John. Probably time to lay off sniffing glue.
Whereas I thought I was hallucinating because at the end of the article is an explanation, drawn from a Physica A article . . .
(Boskone: Chad Orzel & I are greatly looking forward to being there.)
For your information, Patrick, it was nail polish remover, and I haven't touched any in years....
Kate, I must have been hallucinating, because it wasn't there last time I looked at it.
I think we all need to drink more Tia Marias. Most scientific. Quant suff.
Yeah, it's an old question that was rerun because people went out and did actual research in response. Speaking as someone employed in a computational fluid dynamics lab, I am comfortable saying the words "Be9nard-Marangoni circulation" and wondering if my friend Carl can reproduce the patterns with his code.
Meant to add: the drink made from girders is of course Irn Bru. One of the enduring memories of my first visit to Scotland is of a young lady drinking Drambuie and Irn Bru. In the same glass.
Damien, that's evil. I can wash a taste out of my mouth, but how do I wash that one out of my brain?
Which is to say: Yes, I've met Irn-Bru, and I ... I don't want to think about it.
John: If you're hallucinating, I've been sniffing the same stuff. Not to mention that on my screen the comments section has my comment before yours and form internal content, it's obvious mine was posted after yours. I think we need to convene a Congressional Committee to investigate. Obviously the Nielsen Haydens are up to something totally nefarious.
Re Boskone: I'm arriving Wednesday night, shopping for the party Thursday. Hanging around in panels and bars and the program ops thereafter.
MKK
Irn-Bru or to give it its Glasgow street name "Ginger" .
To paraphrase/mangle the Simpsons; "The cause of and answer to Glasgow being Heart attack capital of the world"
I'm somewhat chuffed to find that my first thought about Tia Maria and cream mixing (that it was due to the Marangoni effect) turned out to be partly correct.
It turns out that I was thinking of the Gibbs-Marangoni effect, which we had somebody studying in the context of molten weld pools while I was in college, which is the Marangoni effect with liquid-solid interfaces. Be9nard-Marangoni is surface-tension-driven flow with liquid-liquid interfaces, but having a good guess made me feel better about my underachieving score on the antonym/synonym quiz.
Well, I can't say I was impressed by the results of the experiment. My doctor-research director wife assures me that, yes, the cream was breaking up into toroidal cells, but it looked awful undramatic to me (especially after the "bursting through" promised by New Scientist).
Maybe because I used heavy cream. Anyway, it did taste good.
This song has been a favorite and the latest mondegreen to trip me up. I wanted to post some of the lyrics on the day after Christmas and Googled my way to several copies -- all with the line about Tia Marias. The problem was that I had always heard it as "the tea and the beers" which seemed logical at least. Indignant, I put "The Bells of Dublin" on the player and turned it up and discovered, well, that I had been wrong . . .
Okay, I'm laughing here . . . last week on Zoom, they showed the kiddie version of this, which involves heavy cream, food coloring, and dishwashing liquid.
Pour a small amount of heavy cream into a cup, add several drops of food coloring (do not stir), then add one drop of dishwashing liquid. Within seconds you are treated to what Zoom calls "fireworks in a glass," as the dishwashing liquid breaks up the fat in the cream into various sized globules and the food coloring rushes into the vacated spaces between the globules.
I imagine it's much the same with Tia Maria.
Chris, I wouldn't know. My tipple of choice is champagne . . . .
Zoom? As in "That's Zoom, Zee-Double-Oh-Em, Box Three Five Four, Boston, Mass, Oh - Two - One - Three Four?" Zoom?
That's still around? Cool.
(Those well over 35, well, it's a Gen X thing. Sorry.)
The "Be9nard" part of the name for the reason is, if I'm remembering the names right, almost a given from the question -- it's a generic name for the sorts of instability-driven flows that result in toroids of that nature (although they're usually closely-packed enough that they produce hexagons). "Marangoni" is any sort of flow driven by variations in surface tension, so it's the part in which the "real" answer lies.
Neat stuff!
- Brooks, also working in computational fluid dynamics....
Erik,
Zoom is around again, rather than still--it came back onto the air a year or so ago. Unfortunately, I can't find anything historical on the website (pbskids.org/zoom), so I don't know exactly when that happened.
Okay, Eric, Adina,
A Zoom quiz:
Am I getting he original cast name right?
Joe
Nina
Tommy...
I can't remember anyone else.
I do remember thinking Nina was cute, and laughed my head off when Tommy ate a whole banana and then regurgitated it when they ran the footage backwards.
Jesus. As Gene Wolfe once wrote, I am cursed with memory, or memory oppresses me...or something like that.
Erik, Adina, John, yes, indeedy, it is "that" Zoom, only now the "send us mail" song is basically hip-hop . . . until they get to "Boston, Mass, 0-2-1-3-4," which is sung _exactly_ the way it was on the original show.
I completely do not remember any of the original cast, and I'm very impressed that John does.
The show was revived around 5 years ago. They've had three casts, with lapover between each one as kids outgrew the show. It's the usual half-hour, though there have been some one-hour specials, (after September 11th, for instance--that was an amazing show that made me cry a lot).
My daughter is almost 7 and now watches Zoom about once a week (she doesn't watch much TV but likes variety, so she sees one episode a week of a whole bunch of different things, rather than the same thing every day). But I've been looking at it for a few years to steal ideas for games and science experiments and things like that to do with my kid. It's just as wonderful now as it was back in the day.
Oh, boy. Melissa, I forgot about them singing 0-2-1-3-4.
This is scary, things are coming back...the show's official stationery...I think maybe I must've sent a letter into the show when it was on and they sent back some kind of card or bookmark that I used...because I can remember the letters and logo.
My daughter, age 2, doesn't watch Zoom, but I should probably tape one or two episodes for her. Get her off the Wiggles for a while.
(When her mom's not around, we watch "hobbits and orcs" and sometimes "the balrog"...)
Zoom. Yoiks. --Though all that's running through my head at the moment is the 3-2-1 Contact theme song. (Friggin' catchy hook...)
What was the name of the vaguely scientific kid detective show they had at the end of that? [Google.] Right. The Bloodhound Gang.
Not that this has much to do with Tia Mariers. Or Elvis Costello. Much. But.
Going back to tnh's comments about Irn Bru, I believe that while it may excellent at stripping tooth enamel, in common with cola and brown sauce it's also very useful for cleaning corroded and tarnished metal objects, so long as you don't leave it in the gunk for too long. (The speed of the acidic action of brown sauce has to be seen to be believed, but it's very effective.)
Along with "massOHHHtwoONEthreeFOUR"...rembember Ubbi Dubbi? Abai duhboo rebemebembeber ibit. "Bobostobon, Mabass, Oboe Tooboo Wuhbun Thrubee Fubor."
Yikes, Xopher!! Thanks for the reminder....
You're welcome...I assume you'll get your revenge at some point. :-)
