Heavy cream is lighter than light cream because it contains more butter fat, which weighs less than water.

Hunh?

Science. It gets me every time. It explains the unexplainable. And proves, of course, exactly how much we don’t get it; how much we just don’t understand the world around us. Even when we think we do.

Take, for example, the popular expression “it’s so hot you could fry an egg on the sidewalk!” Sure; it’s a figure of speech. But Robert Wolke, professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, actually tested it out for his book What Einstein Told His Cook. Others have done this (even at least one person of my own acquaintance). Wolke, however, went a step further. Actually, he took a whole hike further:

To investigate the egg assertion, he actually went out and measured the pavement temperature in Austin, Tex., during a heatwave. He found that the hottest it got, even on blacktop, was 145 degrees F — well below the 158 degree minimum needed for an egg to start coagulating. Not satisfied with pure theory, he cracked an egg on the pavement and waited. Nothing happened.

Helpfully, Wolke then went around measuring the temperature of other surfaces, and reports that a dark blue Ford Taurus reached 178 degrees F, making it a better frying pan than sidewalks or roadways.”The wonderful thing about science is that it can even explain things nobody needs to know,” Wolke concludes.

Heck, yes.

Makes you want to go out and experiment. Our dark blue station wagon won’t work; it’s a Saturn and made of resin. Hmm; I know someone with a dark blue Ford. I wonder if she’d be willing to experiment – all in the name of science, of course.

(Check out BusinessWeek Online’s article called Plenty of Food for Thought, their review of Wolke’s latest venture into science.)