"Cracking the Egg Sprinkler Mystery" on NPR's Science Friday!

While I was listening to Science Friday on the radio today, I was most intrigued by a small excerpt they included at the end about an experiment that sounded like fun! Apparently, this experiment was fueled by a scientist at BYU, who got the idea from a former professor, who got the idea from an old high school teacher, and so on and so on. You get the picture. Who knows how far all these fun experiments go back in time? No matter. The point is, they're still fun and they're timeless.

The gist of the experiment is simple, and anyone can do it, even your preschooler. You pour milk out into a puddle on your kitchen counter. Spin a hardboiled egg in the milk and watch the science unfold. The milk will literally crawl up the side of the egg and then spray out from the egg's "equator," like a miniature sprinkler system! And the mystery behind the science? Well, it's really no mystery at all if you're familiar with a man named Bernoulli. Bernoulli developed my favorite equation in the whole, wide world, which relates velocity with pressure. The higher the velocity of air or liquid, the lower the pressure. Incidentally, hydrology-minded people like myself use this equation indirectly every day, because Darcy's Law-- an equation that describes the movement of groundwater-- was derived from Bernoulli's Principle.

You can see Bernoulli's Principle in action using a hardboiled egg and various other objects on the Science Friday video at:

http://www.sciencefriday.com/video/05/04/2012/cracking-the-egg-sprinkler-mystery.html