Pizza Tossing Physics Gives Insight to Mini Motors

Who would have thought there would be a link between pizza tossing and miniature motors?

“At first it started from a conversation I had with a colleague, Dr. Heidi Forde from medicine here at Monash University,” James Friend, coauthor of the study, told PhysOrg.com. “She couldn't understand how our little motors worked. So I had the flash of insight that, well, they work like a chef tossing pizza dough. The dough spins just like the rotor spins because the chef tosses the rotor just like the motor does; the differences between the two are just really in the details. Turns out no one had apparently thought about how to really toss pizza, either, so that became a bigger part of what we looked at with this, and when we found that experts tossed pizza exactly as the theory said they should for optimum results, we were thrilled.”

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