Tumbling toast, Murphy's Law and the Fundamental Constants

There's a widespread suspicion among the public that toast sliding off a plate or table has a natural tendency to land butter side down, thus providing prima facie evidence for Murphy's Law: "If something can go wrong, it will". Most scientists, in contrast, dismiss such belief as ludicrous. Indeed, an investigation by the BBC- TV science programme Q.E.D. in 1993 claimed to have proved definitively that the whole notion was nothing but an urban myth. However, as I show in the paper, the experiments carried out by the programme were dynamically inappropriate (in that they consisted of people simply tossing buttered bread into the air - hardly common practice around the breakfast table). When the problem of toast sliding off a plate or table is examined more carefully - with the toast modelled as a thin, rigid, rough lamina - it turns out that the public perception is quite correct.
[more]

thanks to plep