Does the pressure matter?
No scientific evidence here, but I always have found it easier to break a full bottle over an empty bottle. When I have dropped a bottle empty, it always seems to give a little bounce, scaring the hell out of me. When dropping it full, I always seem to be going for the mop.
I am sure someone more knowledgable will come along soon. Seems like there has to be some actual facts floating around here.
WAG, but I don’t think it’s the pressure so much as it is the liquid. An empty bottle has some “give” to the glass (microscopic, I’d say) that lets the shock radiate and dissipate. A full bottle would transmit that shock to every part of the bottle via the liquid. A physicist will be along shortly to prove I’m wrong.
FMG, Murphy’s Law says all full bottles break.
Minor nitpick: if it’s empty, how can it be any more empty of beer than anything else? It’s just as empty of napalm or tomato juice.
Now if you’d said an empty beer bottle, that would be okay since that indicates what was in it before.
End of nitpick.
It’s possible the greater mass of a full bottle is resulting in more force in the collision, but I too await a physicist to prove me wrong.
This would be my guess. In the name of science, I cracked open a bottle of Shiner Blonde. The empty bottle weighed 200 g, while the full bottle weighed 580 g. So, a full bottle would hit the ground with almost 3 times as much force as an empty bottle dropped from the same distance.
Scientific Inquiry is a bitch, isn’t it? 