Falling Toasts, Murphy's Principle

I recently read something amusing and funny recently. Its about Murphy's Law, but more specifically, its about the singular phenomenon of toasts having the most annoying ability to fall buttered side down onto the floor. Well, its not your bad luck the author says, but its more about how the universe conspires to make your toast fall buttered side down.

More to the point, its the unfortunate physics involved. For toast that you so accidentally nudged off the table, would tend to rotate about the table edge, and start to slip and fall thereafter. The time it takes to hit the floor, all the while rotating in mid-air, is simply too short for it to have made a minimum of 280 degrees. Clearly, the height of the table is mostly to blame. Because most flat rectangular block-like objects pushed off the table, tend to fall up side down(no pun intended, if there were any).

A simple physics calculation, one that any physics JC student is capable of carrying out, will suffice to show this. Of course, here a even simpler general estimate will show that this is the case. We can estimate a normal bread like object will rotate approximately in range of 1revolutions per sec, to 1.5 revolution per sec. A fall from the table would take approximately 0.4 sec. At 1 rev per sec, the toast would have turned through approximately 144 degrees when it makes contact with the floor. And subsequently it will fall, "buttered side down".

It is basically a matter of how our bodies are built. Tables are roughly one-third to half our height. Toasts are roughly the size of our hands. Its all about the observation that there appears to a limit to how tall we can grow. For bipeds(people who go on two legs), we can't be very tall for the simple reason that we have very low stability. For if we were to fall, from such a great height, our skulls would take quite a hit. You might ask if there might exist some ultra tough polymer that could act as our skulls. The answer is that in all probably means, no. Because there is certain amount of energy holding the atoms together. If you exceed that, your skull would shatter/shear/deform.

Perhaps Murphy's Principle is just about how the physics of our universe is like that.