The scene: Me and three friends are sitting down to an artery choking meal of steak and chips. There is a ketchup bottle in the middle of the table flanked by salt, pepper and various condiments.
Midway through our excellent meal, there is a pop! (kind of sucking sound almost), and the top of the bottle flies off and lands next to the bottle.
Stunned silence. Then laughter.
I’ve never believed in ghosts, but I have no idea how to explain this (I don’t really know much about physics).
This I can say; the top may not have been screwed on very well, and it was about half full.
Any suggestions or explanations would be appreciated - lest I start believing in ghosts!
This happened in my kitchen cupboard, spraying ketchup
A few theories:
(If you don’t keep it in the fridge) some kind of fermentation is taking place, that causes gas production. The lid is hermetically sealed, possibly with congealed ketchup, and thus gets forced off.
(If you do keep it in the fridge) the cold air heated up and expanded, forcing the lid off.
Ketchup tends to contain less preservatives today than it might have done in the past, so it can ferment in the bottle (there have been whole threads on this topic; searching on the terms Ketchup and fridge should find one or two.
The ketchup bottle had previously been in the refridgerator with the lid partially open. It was removed from the fridge, having it’s top sealed and placed on the table in a warm room.
As the bottle warmed to ambient temperatures the cold dense air inside would tend to expand, and pressure will build. When sufficient pressure had built the top popped off.
On preview I see jjimm posited this as one of several explanations.
It is easy to underestimate the forces of air pressure, recently on holiday I drove through the mountains of Cyprus, at altitude I drank from a bottle of water, exhausting it, and I replaced the lid. When I returned back to sea-level I noticed the bottle had been truly crushed.
Bloody hell, on preview I see you’ve come back to give jjimm the thumbs up, damn you jjimm, for making my post redundant, I’m posting anyway, gotta get my post-count up.
Well if it’s any help TGU, i give you a thumbs up as well.
By having the “lid partially open” I take it you mean partially unscrewed? The thing is, what happened was; it had been opened and used already, and then resealed…so surely the pressure would have been let out?
I don’t think I’ll ever look at my ketchup the same way again…mind you I don’t think this bottle hadd much time to ferment in the fridge. It was only about a week old or so.
No. If it had just been taken out of the fridge, it would have still been cold. So when the lid was replaced, it was still cold. Then during the course of the meal it warmed up until… POP.
