Snap Crackle And Pop Physics

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In physics, pop is the sixth derivative of the position vector with respect to time, with the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth derivatives being velocity, acceleration, jerk, snap (or jounce), and crackle, respectively; pop is thus the rate of change of the crackle with respect to time. I read that the rate of change of acceleration is called Jerk, and the rate of change of Jerk is called Jounce. I guess sometimes these higher order derivatives are used when designing extremely precise equipment, like the Hubble or someone on this form said camshaft design. We can even talk about. The term snap will be used throughout this paper to denote the fourth derivative of displacement with respect to time. Another name for this fourth derivative is jounce. The fifth and sixth derivatives with respect to time are referred to as crackle and pop respectively. Jerk, snap and higher derivatives. Snap, Crackle, and Pop. The floorboards creak and pop as cooling shrinks them unevenly. Drying can do the same kind of thing. Like a million rubber bands stretched tight and waiting to.

My name is Jennifer, and I am completely addicted to Nature's Path Flax-Plus brand of pumpkin/flax granola. Seriously addicted. As in, I eat the stuff straight out of the box, no accompanying soy milk, no nothin'.

In fact, I have to exercise considerable restraint not to down the entire box over the course of a single day by taking 'just a nibble' here and there. I monitor the 'stash' in my pantry very closely, and get a bit jittery when the inventory starts to run low. Occasionally I go 'cold turkey' for a few weeks, just to prove to myself that I can quit any time. Jen-Luc Piquant suspects the folks at Nature's Path have laced their cereal with crack, but if so, it's Certified Organic (TM) crack, delivered in a tasty, nutritious format.

My addiction might not be the subject of hard-hitting investigative journalism ('Tonight on Hard Copy: people who love their breakfast cereal too much!'), but I'm certainly not alone in my enthusiasm. Americans each consume about 10 pounds -- that's 160 bowls -- of cereal per person every year.

In the US, among the most enduring brands is Kellogg's Rice Krispies, introduced in 1928, which has its very own Website. Kellogg's ingenious marketing strategy for the cereal certainly helped boost its enduring popularity, particularly the introduction of three cartoon elfin sprites, appropriately named Snap, Crackle and Pop, after the sound made whenever milk is poured over a bowl of the cereal. Check out this vintage 1950s commercial.

Memorable, right? That's why they are instantly recognizable to any American; in fact, in 2002 a pollster found that most Americans can name the three elves but can't name any three of the nine sitting Supreme Court Justices, who clearly need a catchy slogan.

Eventually, Kellogg's went global with its marketing slogan: it's 'Riks! Raks! Poks!' in Finnish; 'Piff! Paff! Puff!' in Swedish; 'Pim! Pum! Pam!' in Spanish; and 'Knisper! Knasper! Knusper!' in German. It's nice to know that the practice of onomatopoeia is universal.

(The sprites are known affectionately to Jen-Luc Piquant as Cric! Crac! and Croc! She categorically denies those tabloid rumors about one wild drunken night in Vegas with the Krispie Krew that ended with her being briefly married to Crackle. Lies. Vicious lies.)

But what is it about Rice Krispies that makes them go snap, crackle, pop? It's not microscopic sprites, although research on the topic has admittedly been sparse. Nonetheless, a food scientist named Ted Labuza at the University of Minnesota investigated the matter a few years ago and came up with a decent explanation for why these popular cereal crisps produce such a distinctive sound.

During the cooking process, each piece of rice expands, creating a network of tiny air-filled pockets and tunnels inside the kernel. Add milk, and the cereal starts to absorb the liquid. This puts pressure on the air inside the pockets, causing the 'walls' to shatter with a snap, crackle, or a pop. Eventually, of course, the cereal becomes saturated and soggy, and the signature sounds cease.

It's quite a bit like how popcorn pops, which depends on the moisture and starch inside the corn kernel, and the hard shell surrounding it. The moisture percentage in particular must be just right. Heating up the kernels causes the starch granules to expand, thereby increasing the pressure inside the hard shell, which eventually explodes when the pressure gets high enough. And the starch granules expand into the fluffy white globs we know and love.

Grains of rice don't naturally have sufficient moisture, but this is added (via steaming) during the manufacturing process for Rice Krispies, and the grains are then oven-popped to give them their unique texture. (We also encourage Labuza to extend his research to investigate why excessive consumption of Cap'n Crunch is so harmful to the roof of one's mouth. Inquiring geek-minds need to know!)

Labuza admits, 'It's not exactly rocket science.' No, it's materials science, and things start to really get interesting when you take things down to the molecular level. That's when you realize that Rice Krispies essentially behave like glass. Rice Krispies feature strong molecular bonds holding the starch molecules together, and, like glass, if you smashed a rice crisp with a hammer, it would crack and shatter. The fine folks at Molecular Expressions include close-ups of the structure of Rice Krispies at various magnifications in their extensive image gallery; you can see them here.

Unlike breakfast cereals, glass is an intensive topic of scientific research, because glass is one of those substances known as 'amorphous solids,' straddling the boundary between solid and liquid phases of matter. No less a luminary than Philip W. Anderson has observed, 'The deepest and most interesting unsolved problem in solid state theory is probably the theory of the nature of glass and the glass transition.'

To wit: In a solid, the molecules arrange themselves in a very precise lattice-type structure, earning them the moniker 'crystalline.' In fluids, the molecules are disordered rather than rigidly bound, enabling the substance to 'flow.'

Glass falls somewhere in between: the molecules are still rigidly bound, but they are also more disordered than in a pure crystalline solid. So glass is neither, or both: it has its own distinct molecular structure that exhibits properties of both liquids and solids.

These structural properties stem from how glass is made. These days, windows are made by pouring molten glass onto molten tin, and letting it naturally spread out and solidify into a perfectly flat sheet. Older methods were less precise; a few artisans still practice them.

You may have seen it at arts and crafts fairs: the glass-blower gets a all of molten glass on the end of a pipe, then blows it into a long, wooden tube-shaped mold. Once the glass has cooled, it's removed from the mold, reheated, and ironed into a single pane. Windows made this way usually contain air bubbles and 'waves,' and aren't always of perfect thickness throughout.

But what's actually happening as the glass goes from a liquid to an amorphous solid? In a straightforward phase transition, like when water freezes into ice, the transition is dependent on well-defined temperature and pressure points. The glass transition is different: it also depends on the rate at which the heating or cooling takes place.

Glass is formed by cooling a liquid below its freezing point, then cooling it some more. Cool it fast enough, in a process known as 'super-cooling,' and the molecules don't have sufficient time to organize themselves into the rigid crystalline lattice structure of a solid. Instead, as the temperature drops the liquid becomes much more 'viscous.' (Viscosity is a measure of a liquid's resistance to flow; the higher the viscosity, the greater the resistance.) As this happens, the molecules gradually move more and more slowly, until they are hardly moving at all.

This indecisiveness on the part of glass -- choose a state of matter already! -- has led to the mistaken assumption that glass is actually a fluid. There is an enduring urban legend that the glass windows in medieval cathedrals are thicker at the bottom because over hundreds of years, the glass has 'flowed' downward and pooled at the bottom. There is a tiny bit of truth to the legend. At the molecular level, glass does 'flow', it just does so very verrry sloooowly.

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Yvonne Stokes, a mathematician at the University of Adelaide in Australia, has performed detailed calculations on old cathedral windows, and estimates that it would take at least 10 million years for the glass at the bottom to grow just 5% thicker. She emphasizes that this is a conservative estimate; it might take much longer.

So there's frankly no way in hell that the irregularities in medieval cathedral windows are due to the flowing properties of glass. Instead, the observed anomalies are probably due to inherent flaws resulting from the manufacturing process. (For more detailed information on the molecular structure of glass, whether or not it can be said to truly 'flow,' and some fascinating early history, see this excellent discussion.)

In a 1999 article in Discover magazine on the physics of glass, Robert Kunzig discussed the possibility of an 'ideal glass': 'what you would produce if you could cool a liquid with geologic slowness while somehow preventing it from crystallizing.' It would be a distinct state of matter, rather than the confused hybrid that is so familiar to us: motionless, with a rigid molecular order like a crystal -- except it wouldn't be a crystal.

Physicists have no idea how to even begin visualizing such a thing. But it could be important. We've heard whispers to the effect that discovering an ideal glass transition phase -- namely, a point during the supercooling process where the molecules have no choice but to move rapidly from the disordered liquid configuration to a highly-ordered solid configuration -- could yield insights into the structure of the early universe, which may have existed in a similar amorphous disordered state.

Snap Crackle And Pop Physics

Alas, the news on that front isn't encouraging. A paper in the June 9 2006 issue of Physical Review Letters, by Princeton University's Salvatore Torquato (et al), concluded that such an ideal glass transition phase doesn't exist. Torquato's team performed a bunch of computer simulations and couldn't find any such well-defined transition point. Torquato told Live Science that 'You could have this continuous change from most disordered to most ordered, and there are an infinite number of possible transition phases between these points. It puts another nail in the coffin for [the ideal transition] theory.'

Maybe that ideal transition phase is a bit questionable, but the mysterious 'Moosino' over at Chi c'e' in Ascolto reports on a very different kind of 'transition phase' from amorphous solid into, well, a million little pieces. Apparently she was driving along one day, when one of the side windows of her car spontaneously shattered. Being such a well-trained scientist, she nosed around until she found some answers.

Basically, the side windows of a car are made of tempered glass, a process that causes the exterior surface to compress while the interior is still expanding a bit. The end result is an exterior compression layer and an interior tension layer -- I believe the technical term is an 'inclusion.' If a crack develops later on in the compression layer, all the interior tension is released all at once. The window goes snap! Or crackle! Or pop!

Just like a bowl of Rice Krispies.

Images: (top) Rice Krispies cereal box. Source: Wikipedia, under fair use. (bottom) Molecular structure of amorphous silica. Wikimedia Commons/Public domain.

Originally posted in September 2006 at the old Cocktail Party Physics site.

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References:

P W Anderson (1995). 'Through the Glass Lightly,' Science 267 (5204): 1615. DOI:10.1126/science.267.5204.1615-e

'Do Cathedral Glasses Flow?' (1998) Am. J. Phys. v66, pp 392—396.

A. Donev, F. H. Stillinger and S. Torquato. (2006) 'Do Binary Hard Disks Exhibit an Ideal Glass Transition?' Physical Review Letters, 96, 225502.

You’re familiar with the elves, Snap! Crackle! and Pop! Their onomatopoetic names match the very cereal they’ve repped since the ’30s—Kellogg’s Rice Krispies. In the years after that, the trio has withstood the influx of cartoon competitors like the Trix Rabbit, Lucky the Leprechaun, the Cookie Crisp thieves, Cap'n Crunch and many more. Lost in the shuffle, however, was a fourth Rice Krispies elf named Pow! His short life is a time-capsule of an era when everyone was dreaming big.

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The history of the three (and for a moment, four) Kellogg's pitchelves begins in 1928 when the cereal first hit shelves and was marketed on radio programs for the way they “merrily snap, crackle and pop in a bowl of milk.” When artist Vernon Grant heard one of the jingles, he sketched a creature for each sound and sent his work to an ad agency in Philadelphia which was handling the Kellogg’s campaign at the time. (Later Kellogg’s worked with Leo Burnett Co., the same ad agency responsible for major characters like the Jolly Green Giant, Tony the Tiger, and the Keebler Elves). Grant referred to the trio as “my children.” Snap! appeared solo on the side of cereal boxes at first and was joined by his brothers in 1941. But they didn’t look like the elves you see today—at first they resembled boyish gnomes and all three had chef hats, as pictured in this 1939 animated short:

Today you’ll find the oldest of the bunch, Snap! in a chef’s hat; Crackle! the middle brother, with a knit beanie (hipsters rejoice!); and Pop! the youngest, tipping his marching band cap.

From 1948 through the mid ’50s, the brothers sponsored the popular children’s program “The Howdy Doody Show.” But in early 1950, Kellogg’s marketers snuck in a fourth friend, Pow. The company said in an email to Smithsonian.com, “[Pow] appeared in two TV commercials. The spaceman character was meant to exude the ‘power of whole grain rice.’ He was never considered an official character.”

These two scans of the original 1955 storyboard dug up from the Kellogg’s archives sketch out two versions of a 60-second commercial introducing the space-man:

In both versions, Pow flies in on what the document calls a helicopter, but what looks like what we’d consider to be a hovercraft. 'Pow means power and power's nice! Rice Krispies power from whole grain rice!,” the voice over announces.

Snap Crackle And Pop Physics Free

The weirdest thing about the space-helmet-wearing elf? He doesn’t speak, he just points at things. The voice over continues: 'Now Pow doesn't say much..he just goes ahead and does things..like putting power into every..lightweight spoonful of Kellogg's Rice Krispies!'

Many questions remain unanswered: Why did they nix the Pow! character? From a marketing perspective, perhaps the original three brothers sounded better in a jingle? And why was he from outer space? Tim Hollis, author of “Part of a Complete Breakfast: Cereal Characters of the Baby Boom Era,” says it was common for children’s programs to include space-related characters at the time.

“There's not much to Pow! It's mostly because of the internet that he's even known at all,” Hollis says. “He was always just sort of a footnote..and at that particular time, everything was space oriented.”

Pow’s brief stint overlapped with Kellogg's sponsorship of the television program “Space Cadet” with Tom Corbett. Rice Krispies advertisements, like the one below featuring three brothers zipping around on flying saucers, tapped into the culture of the time.

Snap Crackle Pop Calculus

“Flash Gordon,” the popular comic book series, was adapted into a live-action television show in 1954, and Disneyland, which opened in 1955, included “Tomorrowland,” a futuristic look at space travel. At the height of this Kellogg’s campaign, the Space Race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was in its nascent stages.

Snap Crackle And Pop Physics 2017

The company issued patches from every manned mission into space from Freedom 7 through Apollo 10 that were included as prizes. And by 1969, sugar-coated Corn Flakes went into outer space as part of the Apollo 11 space crew's breakfast during their historic mission to the moon, according to the company’s website. (The air-tight space bag of cereal is currently in storage at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum).

Jerk Snap Crackle Pop

Pow’s two-commercial stint as an unofficial Krispies character was short-lived, but it seems the original Rice Krispies gang is doing okay for themselves: they remain the first and longest-running cartoon mascots to represent a Kellogg’s product.