The Flying Egg Debacle

Today I was talking to a coworker, and suddenly her phone’s alarm went off. She told me it was to remind her to quit steeping her tea, or she would forget it until it was too strong to drink. That reminded me of a story in my distant past, and a quick perusal of my blog leads me to believe I have not written about this before. It was the Flying Egg Debacle, and the worst part? Nobody witnessed it.

It happened when I was in college. I was hard boiling an egg, so I set it in a pot full of water, set it on the stove, turned the burner onto low, and promptly forgot about it. You know how college is – you are always sleep-deprived. (Unlike the workaday world?) So when I got back from class that afternoon, one of my housemates accosted me and demanded to know why I had an empty pot cooking on the stove.

“It shouldn’t be empty,” I said. “I was hard boiling an egg.”

“There’s no egg there now,” she told me. So we went into the kitchen and looked around… and then we looked up. There was my egg, plastered onto the ceiling. My housemate started laughing so hard that she forgot about being mad. When I told Rich this story years later, he speculated that pressure had built up in the egg until it flew up to the ceiling. Someday I would like to replicate this experiment, preferably with a video camera available, but would it ever happen again that way? Maybe the time has come to find out…

Famous Hat