Tossing the toast

Why does it always drops buttered side down?

Imagine yourself in the morning, sleepy eyed and hungry for a toast that has just popped up from the great toaster machine of yours. As you start thinking of how will you eat that toast, from which side will you bite it first, you absent-mindedly reach for the Marmite, and oh oh... the toast has fallen to the floor – and guess what butter side down! you curse your self for not being fast in your reflexes to save your toast from falling down and eaten up by your dog. But do you think why did it land butter side down?

And why not the plain side down, or a much needed position vertically straight.

Or does it really drops buttered side down?

The odds of this are exactly 50/50 just like tossing a coin.

with buttered toast it just seems to happen that way, people don't remember the times that it doesn't, people who answer "because the buttered side is heavier" obviously do not consider the physical laws of gravitational force for free falling bodies and those who do have some kind of atmospheric effects on them.

Where is physics involved?

Many have taken Sod's Law as the root causal factor for why toast always falls butter side down. This is incorrect. The real answer lies in simple physics. A falling piece of bread is influenced by several factors. The major one is gravity. The second and often overlooked one is height of the standard kitchen counter. The third factor is the size of the bread. The final one is the deviation angle at which the bread initially leaves its starting position. Most falling bread falls either to the left or the right. Rarely does a person hold both sides of the bread level with the ground and simultaneously drop it from both hands at the same instant. Instead, one is usually balancing the aforementioned bread slice in one hand and a bread knife in the other, So the chances are of the side held upwards in your hand may it be the butter side or the other one.

What are the factors?

It all depends on how you dropped it, from where you dropped it and how big your slice of toast actually is. All of these factors contribute to the butter side up or butter side down landing position.

If taken with details from our early morning case scenario, the toast slips off the side of the table and is given a slight rotation as it starts to fall. As most kitchen tables and work surfaces are about waist height, the toast only manages half a rotation before it hits the floor, and bang; butterside down. So, if you want to have your toast landing butter side up, you’d better build your work surfaces twice as high or make smaller slices so that they have time enough to complete the rotation.

What is the truth if it's a myth?

The truth is just what I stated above, first it’s just that people ignore the fact that it does NOT ALWAYS fall butter side down, if you drop it ten time maybe it will fall six times in butter-down position, but why do people ignore the fact that the rest of four times it has landed buttered side up.

And why six times buttered side down?

Well, you got a point here, why six times buttered side down? I say this is when we can say physics plays its role. For the sake of proving this consider the proofs below:

As you can see the gravitational force between the buttered toast and earth is more than the gravitational force between a plain toast and earth, this is because the buttered toast is heavier in mass than the simple toast.

So if we see the situation with a one sided buttered toast according to the above proven results we can come to a conclusion that when the toast falls it does tend to fall buttered side down because of the excessive mass on such side but since this force is NOT really that impact full, it some of the times fails to land on the buttered side, But it does at least leave a difference in the final scores to finish as six times to the four times of non-buttered side down landing.

So, its not a single thing that matters in this process the height, the angle, the weight of different sides plus the altitude level you are standing on; all such things do effect the final results.

And since the cat always land on its feet, and you don’t wanna lose your toast; why don’t you tie it to the back of the cat. This way you'll save it from landing buttered side down. But then, who wants to eat a cat-hairy toast.