A Question for Tea Time

Even the simplest tea-time ritual has its own science.

In the late 1990s, physicist Len Fisher turned his attention to the simple gesture of dunking a biscuit in tea.

He set out to calculate the delicate balance between letting the tea soak in and keeping the biscuit intact.

The study appeared in Nature in 1999 under the playful title Physics Takes the Biscuit.

Later that year, it earned Fisher an Ig Nobel Prize for Physics.

The story of biscuits is a long one, filled with small rituals, curious questions and details that still have a way of surprising us.