It’s been a scientific truth so universally acknowledged that it’s taught in classrooms and repeated in pop-science videos: An egg is strongest when dropped vertically, on its ends. But when MIT engineers actually put this assumption to the test, they cracked open a surprising revelation. Their experiments revealed that eggs dropped on their sides — not their tips — are far more resilient, thanks to a clever physics trick: Sideways eggs bend like shock absorbers, trading stiffness for superior energy absorption. Their open-access findings, published today in Communications Physics, don’t just…
