Human-like beings are doomed to drop toast butter-side down 🥪 In 1995, Robert Matthews wrote a paper showing that toast landing butter-side down isn’t just bad luck or evidence of Murphy’s Law ('If it can go wrong, it will') - it’s physics and ultimately ascribable to the values of the fundamental constants. Toast typically begins to rotate as it tips off a table, but the height of most tables (~75 cm) is just enough for it to rotate about half a turn, landing butter-side down. This isn’t due to butter's weight or aerodynamics, which are negligible. Rather, it's about the torque and time during the fall. In this paper, Matthews builds a detailed dynamical model of the toast’s tumble and shows experimentally that under realistic conditions (with little horizontal velocity), there's a built-in bias toward a butter-side down landing. Surprisingly, this bias is linked to fundamental constants: table height is constrained by human height, which in turn is limited by biomechanical stability and molecular bond strength (à la Press, 1980). Given the values of fundamental constants, the result is universal - all intelligent, human-like beings are doomed to drop toast butter-side down. To avoid this fate? A little push adds horizontal velocity, reducing rotational torque, a counterintuitive fix but backed by physics.

Men, this is the way: