The Kettle That Goes Quiet Before It Boils
Why does a kettle get loud, then quiet, then loud again? Evan follows a bubble from the hot element to the surface and explains the collapsing steam that makes the noise.
Why the Shower Curtain Attacks You
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Show notes
The curtain problem
Turn the shower on and the curtain lunges at your legs. For decades physicists argued about why. Evan lays out the three main explanations, hot air rising, the Bernoulli effect, and a horizontal vortex inside the shower, then reproduces a famous experiment with a smoke pencil to see which one holds up in his own bathroom.
- Three explanations and who proposed them
- Why hot air rising cannot be the whole story
- The Bernoulli idea and its limits
- The vortex model and the 2001 simulation
- A listener wants to know if a heavier curtain helps
Next episode, why a spoon in the microwave sparks and a grape sometimes catches fire.
Transcript
Welcome back to Why the Kettle Sings, I am Evan Castellano. Today, a small daily horror. You turn on the shower, and the curtain comes for you. Cold, clingy, aggressive. For years physicists genuinely disagreed about why, and I love that, because it means a question in your bathroom was hard enough to need a supercomputer. I will give you the three explanations, hot air rising, fast water pulling air, and a sideways tornado living inside your shower, and then I will show you the smoke experiment I did at home to test them, with my wife holding the camera and questioning my life choices. One explanation wins. At the end, a listener asks whether a heavier curtain fixes it. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts. Towel ready.
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