The Physicist and the Wrapper
by James Glanz
New York Times
Sunday, June 4, 2000
Week in Review (Section 4, page 2)
Like poets who find inspiration on the kitchen table or back porch,
physicists are rediscovering the world they can see with the unaided eye.
The trend began at least a decade ago when they began pondering why Brazil
nuts, the largest and heaviest nuggets in a can of mixed nuts, always end
up on top after being jostled during shipping.
The movement may have found its Ferlinghetti in Dr. Eric Kramer, a
physicist at Simon's Rock College in Massachusetts, who presented
experiments to explain that plague upon opera, theater and serious music:
the maddening, inescapable crackling of candy wrappers.
After analyzing the sound, Dr. Kramer and a colleague discovered that it
was not a continuous rustle but a series of brief, unpredictable bursts
just thousandths of a second long. As theatergoers may already suspect,
opening a wrapper slowly does not quiet those bursts but only slows down
the rate at which they go off. Each snap, Dr. Kramer found, is the product
of a tiny rearrangement of one of the creases in the wrapper.
The dynamics of those innumerable little rearrangements is complex enough
to keep any physicist happy. But like the Brazil nut phenomenon, which was
found to be caused by a subtle circulation in the can, the candy wrapper
research may be most interesting as another step in the journey of
physicists back from the minuscule scale of the atom and the gigantic scale
of the cosmos. Like Ferlinghetti, they are rediscovering the mysteries of
the here and now.
