The Physics Pub and the Popcorn Quantum

Figure 1: Some fine Whiskey ...

In the Fysicum - the physics building - here in Lund there is a pub on Wednesdays. Cool enough already! Even better: They have a great variety of beer and Whiskey! Even even better: The prices are very low! As I could not make it to the pub last week as I was working we went there again this week. And as always if many physicists come together in one place someone came up with a ... good! idea. From the popcorn we ordered there was some corn left. And there were tealights on the table. What a shame to waste the corn! (Although it tastes quite good as corn as well.) So someone build a device to make tealight popcorn! (See figure 2.) Basic principle of operation: Put corn into spoon - put spoon over flame - wait. But as always when introducing new experimental techniques the first run failed: The spoon crashed into the light and suffocated the flame. Too bad! So a supportive spoon was installed to prevent this. (This is the version visible in figure 2.)

Figure 2: Original quantum popcorn experiment setup.

Next and most important ingredient for any first time experiment: patience! So we waited ... and waited ... and waited ... and nothing happened. After some time of alternatingly staring into the flame and into our glasses one of the experimenters came up with the great idea: Liquid! (Probably he/she stared more into his/her glass than into the flame - "In cervisia idea" - freely after "In vino veritas" ... ;) ) So we took the next best liquid available and poured beer into the spoon. :D And waited ... well, same as above ... The master chef in our group then suggested "oil" after a while. So someone sneaked into the kitchen and organised some butter which we forwarded into the (new) spoon. More waiting. Then suddenly: POOF!! A wild popcorn appeared! It worked! Universal amazement all over the place! After carefully examining the product of the experiment one of the experimenters even sacrificed himself to taste-test the result.

Figure 3: One quantum of popcorn -
created in the Physics Pub in Lund.

As there is only salty butter in Sweden the popcorn tasted exactly like (salty) popcorn is supposed to taste! After a quick calculation of the density of popcorn states we concluded unanimously that we produced one quantum (the lowest possible unit in case of quantised states or expressed differently: the smallest amount of something) of popcorn! A real success! Now mankind is not only capable of producing continuous spectra of popcorn in an industrially optimised way (cooking pot) but also to investigate the properties of low-dimensional popcorn structures. The last two month of studying seem to finally pay off!




(Sorry for the slight misplacement of the images, I did not have the nerve to dig in the auto generated html code to optimise the image placing ...)