Max Kurzweil Describes the Science Behind the Potato Chips

By Max Kurzweil

i-f2529ff645072cfe56541157608d124d-allen kurzweil.jpgWhen we're at a baseball game or on a picnic we call 'em chips. But when we're cooking up experiments at the Chip Science Institute we maintain in our basement, or at the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington D.C., we call the world's most beloved munchie "research material."

For the last five years my dad and I have been using potato chips as a portal into the world of biology, chemistry, earth science, and physics. Who knew thin-sliced, deep-fried tubers could teach us about buoyancy, electrostatics, surface tension, acoustics, forensics, Bernoulli's principle, and more. When we tell you that investigating the material properties of the potato chip can be a BLAST, we mean it. (We'll be giving away a few dozen potato propulsion pipes to prove the point!) So for folks who like snacking on science high in saturated facts, you can't go wrong analyzing the material properties of chips, bags, lids, spuds, and tubes. Hope to see in D.C. -Max Kurzweil, co-inventor of Potato Chip Science (the bright blue bag of experimental swag).

You can meet Max Kurzweil and Featured Author Allen Kurzweil at the Festival Sunday, April 29th at 12:45 PM on the Family/Hands On Science Stage.

More like this

Earlier this week, members of the Senate Finance Committee announced an agreement to extend funding for the Children’s Healt
Amy Calistri and Tim Lavalli appear to have solved the mystery of where the extra $2 million in chips during the World Series of Poker main event came from. The answer is: incompetence.
What's a gene chip? Well, it's not a gene chip, that's for sure. It's a microarray. It has various parts of a genome arrayed on a small chip. The parts of the genome you put on the chip depends on what you're interested in studying.
More than 8 million U.S. children depend on the Children’s Health Insurance Program for access to timely medical care. The program is authorized through 2019, but its federal funding expires in September and it’s unclear what Congress will do.