I think of an experiment to test a theory.

As I age, I find that my mind often wanders into different directions, normally unbidden. I think it’s because I have very little in the way of distractions in my home: I live alone and I don’t have a TV going all the time. This gives me time to think — and sometimes I think about unusual things.

The Science of Hot Coffee

This morning, I thought about why it was so important for me to warm my coffee cup before brewing coffee into it and why it was equally important to get the metal teaspoon I use to add sugar and stir out of that cup as quickly as possible. It all has to do with temperature: keeping that coffee hot as long as possible so I could enjoy it at my own pace before it got cold.

The warmed coffee cup is pretty obvious — we’ve all had the experience of putting a salad on a dish still hot from the dishwasher. The salad touching the plate isn’t as cold as the salad that isn’t. This is why they chill salad plates (and forks) at good restaurants. It follows that putting something hot into a cold vessel will do the same. I guarantee you’ve experienced this yourself. I know only one other person who takes the time to warm his coffee cup before putting coffee in it.

(And yes, I know a lot of folks don’t give a damn about what they likely consider a minuscule temperature change. But I do.)

But the spoon? Why is it so important for me to remove the spoon quickly?

This morning I thought a little about that. I’d always assumed that the stainless steel teaspoon would act as a heat sink. One end is in the hot coffee and the other is in the relatively cool kitchen. The heat from the coffee would heat up the spoon, which was made of metal — an excellent conductor of heat — and that heat would travel up the spoon handle to its end. The handle, which was constantly being warmed by the coffee would be constantly cooled by room temperature. That heat energy that is lost would have to come from somewhere: the coffee.

This is something I’ve always assumed. It makes sense to me. But this morning, for some reason, I wondered if I was right. And then I came up with an experiment to test my theory.

The Scientific Method

I was in fifth grade when I learned about the scientific method. That was a long time ago and, not being a scientist or in any way involved in lab work my entire life, you’d think I’d forget it. But some things just stick with me. I think the scientific method stuck with me because it made sense logically — and I’m definitely a logical thinker.

Don’t worry — I won’t go into the scientific method in detail here. I’ll just focus on this diagram, which shows all steps to the method. The important concept to take away from this is that it starts with a question you might want answered and then goes through the process of coming up with a possible answer (hypothesis) and testing that answer (experiment). If the results (analyzed data) support the hypothesis, you might be done; if they don’t, then you’re definitely not done. In either case, you’d likely explore other hypotheses, going through the process again (and again and again, if necessary) until you either couldn’t get an answer — i.e., the experiment results simply do not support any hypothesis — or you were confident that one of your hypotheses was correct.

When I thought up an experiment to test my theory about a stainless steel teaspoon as a heat sink, I realized I was using the scientific method. In real life — not in a lab, not as a scientist. It was a great example about how some of the stuff we learn in school that we don’t think we’ll ever use in life does become relevant every once in a while.

Want to see the process for my experiment? Here are the first four steps:

1. Observation/Question – More of a question: does coffee get cold faster if you leave a teaspoon in it?
2. Research Topic Area – Well, understanding what a heat sink is is probably important to forming a hypothesis.
3. Hypothesis – Yes, coffee does get cold faster if I leave a stainless steel teaspoon in it than if I don’t. (This would not apply to a plastic teaspoon since plastic is a poorer conductor of heat than metal.)
4. Experiment – Take two identical cups. Add an equal amount of boiling water to each cup. Put a room temperature teaspoon inside one cup. Take temperature readings every 5 to 10 minutes to see if the one with the teaspoon gets cold faster. (You could expand the experiment to include three cups and put a plastic teaspoon in the third to test the hypotheses that plastic teaspoons would not have an effect.)

That’s as far as I got. I thought up the experiment but I didn’t do it. It simply isn’t that important to me to know, one way or the other, if I’m right. But it might make a nice at-home experiment for home-schooled kids if you happen to know any. Science is important — and heat sinks are a part of our every day life — they’re inside every computer we own.

Why Blog about It?

Why am I blogging about this? Well, I think I surprised myself this morning by my train of thought and where it led me. I wanted to share that with other folks who might find themselves consumed with things that prevent them from thinking for themselves.

Every day, we’re faced with a barrage of inputs from family, friends, strangers, advertisers, and the news media. Direct conversation, text, and email; social media posts by people with their own agenda; print, audio, and video advertisements on billboards, in magazines, and everywhere online and on television; network and cable news broadcasters. Too much of that input is trying to fill your head with someone else’s thoughts and ideas and manipulate your opinions. If you follow politics at all, you know exactly what I mean. It’s hard to have a moment to yourself, a time to just think based on verifiable facts and to form your own ideas and opinions.

I do this a lot. Yes, I spend a lot too much time on Twitter but that’s the only social media I allow access to my brain. (Seriously folks, #DeleteFacebook.) And even then, I’m careful about who I follow. I don’t want a diet of political nonsense from either side so I tend to avoid accounts that post just politics. Instead, I try to get tweets from fellow thinkers — or at least from folks who have a life that doesn’t revolve around cable news and the latest political/celebrity scandal. And when I’m not on Twitter — which really is most of the time — I keep active and work on ways to make my life fulfilling.

I think therefore I am. If you can’t think for yourself, do you really exist?

Anyway, does leaving a stainless steel teaspoon in your coffee make it cool faster? If you do the experiment, let me know.