Take note of how a martini glass was shaken to create those bubbles of concise intoxication the next time you sip one on a date or at a party. This is because scientists have created a new way to shake a martini in order to create a certain pattern in the cocktail that changes shape depending on the physical qualities of the drink.
Physicists at Canada’s University of Waterloo discovered that adding a lot of syrup to a martini glass produces a pattern of vortices like elongated hearts when peering into the glass from above.
What led physicists to this conclusion?
According to a New Scientist report, a physicist named Zhaon Pan from the University of Waterloo was vacationing overseas when he saw an intriguing physics game in his glass of martini.
His martini was full of bubbles, and when he shook the glass, he could see them trace an intricate structure of vortices.
He noticed a trend when he reproduced the technique in the lab with a mixture of water, glycerine, and food dye instead of the traditional martini cocktail.
Pan and his students allegedly mixed liquids with varying ‘Reynolds numbers,’ a physics measure that denotes an imbalance between the particles in fluid—the difference between the speed propelled by their natural flow and decreased momentum due to viscosity—and came to the following result:
Shaking the martini glass formed a pattern of vortices like elongated hearts for mixes with a lot of syrup (high Reynolds number).
“The first thing that occurred to me when I saw this is that anything that can have a specific pattern must have some theory behind it, there might be a nice combination of physics and math in this beautiful problem,” said Mabel Song, who collaborated with Pan on a series of stunning photographs of the new phenomenon, which will be presented at the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Mechanics conference in Washington, DC later this year.