I’ve been afraid to ask this even though it has happened to me several times in my life. I just laugh and try to alleviate the mess where I can.
In: Physics
Some of y’all in the comments are missing the “like I’m five” part of “explain like I’m five”…
To answer your question OP, water- or in this case, beer- *really really doesn’t like* bubbles moving around in it. If the bubbles are small or moving slow, it’s not so bad- but if there’s a lot of them, or they go really fast, the water can’t get out of the way fast enough, and the bubble gets “squished” as it tries to get away.
But when you squish a bubble *inside* the water, instead of a ‘pop’ there’s a little wave. That little wave can add up with other little waves, and lots of these little bubble-squish-waves hit the glass of the bottle *juuuuuuust* right, causing it to crack. Cracked glass is *really bad* at not-cracking-more, so those cracks get bigger until the glass fails.
All this happens *really super fast*.
The phenomenon is called “cavitation”: the bottle suddenly moves downwards while the beer inside doesn’t (because of inertia), this causes the formation of a vacuum on the bottom of the bottle. Beer contains CO2, which is a gas, and it is immediately forced out of the liquid to fill the vacuum; now, gases don’t need much space when dissolved in a liquid, but once you force them out of their solvent, they start to push (gases always tend to expand as much as they can) and that’s why beer starts coming out of the bottle.
If the gas in the liquid is not enough to fill the vacuum, the liquid violently collapses back in its place. The force of the implosion can even shatter the bottom of the bottle.
Not a scientist, but from what I understand , tapping the top of the bottle causes The bubbles further down in the beverage to activate far more than they normally would, causing it to foam up .
If you’ve ever noticed, the fishing over usually only happens when your bottle is full or nearly full. Try it on a bottle with only 1/4 left, and it’ll rise some,
But won’t overflow.
Mark Rober has a great video explaining it on YouTube, essentially a vacuum forms in the bottom then collapses 10 times quicker than it formed creating a shockwave that cracks the glass.
Thanks y’all.
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