Everyday Coffee-Cup Physics Demonstrations Across Optics Acoustics and Fluids
A single coffee cup can demonstrate a surprising range of physics: optical caustics from curved reflecting surfaces, lifting of degenerate acoustic modes in a cavity, the temperature-dependent hot-chocolate pitch effect, the tea-leaf paradox driven by secondary flow, double-diffusive convection, and the evaporation-driven coffee-ring stain. Each phenomenon is paired with a low-cost experiment and a minimal quantitative model, making it a unified teaching resource that connects optics, acoustics, and fluid mechanics.
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Science of a coffee cup: a physicist walks into a bar... Aleksi Bossart1, Romain Fleury2, and
A self-contained pedagogical review that uses a single everyday object, a coffee cup, to demonstrate and quantitatively model physical phenomena drawn from optics, acoustics, and fluid mechanics. For…