The key to a successful egg drop experiment? Drop it on its side

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Eggs are less most likely to break when dropped horizontally vs. vertically, opposing standard knowledge.

Egg drop competitors are a staple of high school and college physics classes. The objective is for trainees to develop a gadget utilizing bubble wrap, straws, or different other products developed to hold an egg and keep it undamaged after being dropped from a considerable height– state, 10 meters (almost 33 feet). There’s even a “naked egg” variation in which a raw egg is dropped into a container listed below. The competitors is meant to teach trainees about structural mechanics and effect physics, and it is not a simple task; the majority of the dropped eggs break.

MIT engineering teacher Tal Cohen chose to examine why the failure rate was so high and reported her group’s findings in a paper released in the journal Communications Physics. “The universal convention is that the egg should be in a vertical orientation when it hits the ground,” Cohen informed Physics Magazine. Their outcomes from regulated trials replicating the egg drop difficulty in the laboratory calls this standard knowledge into concern.

It is not an unreasonable presumption to make. Another popular physics celebration technique is to stroll on a number of containers of eggs without breaking them. Normally it just takes about 5 and a half pounds of force to break a single eggshell, much less than the typical adult human. As I composed for Slate back in 2012, “The key is to align the eggs so that the narrow pole is pointing upward, and step in such a way to distribute your weight over the entire surface area, to avoid overloading any one eggshell.” (Being barefoot likewise assists.)

I kept in mind at the time a remarkably long history of clinical research studies of eggshells and how fractures propagate– especially in the 1950s and 1960s, when they served as beneficial designs for failure analysis when developing aircrafts. The strength originates from the egg shell’s structure; it is comprised mainly of calcium carbonate (calcite) crystals, comparable to tooth enamel or sea shells, ingrained within a protein matrix. The egg shell is enhanced even more by a thin inner collagen layer. This tends to keep damage localized as fractures spread out bit by bit instead of one tidy break.

Cohen et al. provide a shoutout in their intro to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travelsparticularly the longstanding quarrel in between individuals of Lilliput and Blefuscu on the very best orientation for breaking an egg. Obviously, there is the timeless chef’s one-handed egg-cracking strategy– commemorated in the 1954 romantic funny, Sabrina— which includes holding the egg in between the fingers and thumb and rapping the edge dramatically versus the rim of the bowl to accomplish a tidy break. Sadly, this normally ends in a crushed, eggy mess when tried by novices. (Practicing with a golf ball can enhance one’s ability.)

MIT researchers have actually formerly studied exactly just how much force to use to the center of an egg. Particularly, the researchers developed a mathematical formula connecting the ovoid geometry of the eggshell and its rigidness– a residential or commercial property that, in addition to strength (an associated however unique principle), represents just how much force a provided item can hold up against before breaking. It’s the narrow idea that is the most crack-resistant part of the egg, given that the shell ends up being more stiff the more the egg curves. That’s why pushing down on both the bottom and top of an egg with your fingers will not work. Turn the egg horizontally and push right at the center, and the shell fractures quickly.

Tightness vs. durability

What’s going on with these most current MIT findings? For the research study, Cohen et al. purchased 180 chicken eggs– Costco’s Kirkland Signature brand name– and performed their own egg drop experiments in the laboratory. They dropped 60 eggs each from 3 various heights (8, 9, and 10 millimeters) onto a tough surface area in 3 various orientations: horizontal, vertical on the sharp end, and vertical on the blunt end. They likewise subjected an extra 60 eggs to compression tests to identify the force needed to break the eggs in both the vertical and horizontal orientations.

Speculative pictures for vertical(leading)and horizontal (bottom) egg drops.

Credit: A. Sutanto et al., 2025

The outcomes: over half of the eggs broke when dropped vertically from an 8-millimeter (31-inch)height, no matter which end of the egg was pointing downward. Less than 10 percent of the horizontally dropped eggs broke. The eggs broke when the force surpassed 45 Newtons, an excellent per-egg load bearing capability that is independent of its orientation.

There was an essential distinction, nevertheless, in between how vertically and horizontally squeezed eggs warped in the compression experiments– particularly, the previous warped less than the latter. The shell’s higher rigidness along its long axis was a benefit due to the fact that the heavy load was dispersed over the surface area. (It’s why the one-handed egg-cracking method targets the center of a horizontally held egg.)

The authors discovered that this benefit when under fixed compression showed to be a downside when dropping eggs from a height, with the horizontal position emerging as the optimum orientation. It boils down to the distinction in between tightness– just how much force is required to warp the egg– and strength, i.e., just how much energy the egg can take in before it fractures.

Cohen et al.’s experiments revealed that eggs are harder when packed horizontally along their equator, and stiffer when compressed vertically, recommending that “an egg dropped on its equator can likely sustain greater drop heights without cracking,” they composed. “Even if eggs could sustain a higher force when loaded in the vertical direction, it does not necessarily imply that they are less likely to break when dropped in that orientation. In contrast to static loading, to remain intact following a dynamic impact, a body must be able to absorb all of its kinetic energy by transferring it into reversible deformation.”

“Eggs need to be tough, not stiff, in order to survive a fall,” Cohen et al. concluded, pointing to our instinctive understanding that we need to flex our knees rather than lock them into a corrected position when landing after a dive. “Our results and analysis serve as a cautionary tale about how language can affect our understanding of a system, and improper framing of a problem can lead to misunderstanding and miseducation.”

DOI: Communications Physics, 2025. 10.1038/ s42005-025-02087-0 (About DOIs).

Jennifer is a senior author at Ars Technica with a specific concentrate on where science fulfills culture, covering whatever from physics and associated interdisciplinary subjects to her preferred movies and television series. Jennifer resides in Baltimore with her partner, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their 2 felines, Ariel and Caliban.

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