Coffee reaction to teaspoon.

[Ina]

This morning, I made myself a cup of cold instant coffee with bottled water. Took it on a table outside, stirred the sugar, noticed some small cirrus like micro foam forming, had a sip and left it for about an hour as I needed to check on my work and start running a processing job. When I came back to finish the coffee, I found a tree like pattern on the coffee surface stemming from the teaspoon left in the cup. I am thinking that my coffee today was slightly conductive and reacted with the teaspoon in the presence of EM fields. what do you think?

 

[duyunne]

I’m not sure about EM fields. It looks like oil. I could be wrong, but I’ve seen something similar when my stir spoon got a spot of bacon grease on it.

 

[monotonic]

I don't think EM fields work as an explanation (although at the atomic level, molecular charges have a role in the effect of surface tension which can cause tree-like patterns like this). That looks like fat on the surface with milk solids in it like with butter. If EMF was causing electrolysis, the bubbles would not be preferentially moving into fat. They would be collecting on the surface, pushing the fat out of the way and probably popping almost instantly. You would see a very light foam if anything, and possibly some corrosion discoloring the spoon.

The amount of energy required to make that amount of foam would be extremely high, I would expect radiation burns or worse from fields capable of that. Most electrolysis experiments use very salty water, because normally water is not conductive enough to electrolyze strongly with a normal lab power supply. I assume you don't dump salt into your coffee.

 

[Ina]

I don't think EM fields work as an explanation (although at the atomic level, molecular charges have a role in the effect of surface tension which can cause tree-like patterns like this). That looks like fat on the surface with milk solids in it like with butter. If EMF was causing electrolysis, the bubbles would not be preferentially moving into fat. They would be collecting on the surface, pushing the fat out of the way and probably popping almost instantly. You would see a very light foam if anything, and possibly some corrosion discoloring the spoon.

The amount of energy required to make that amount of foam would be extremely high, I would expect radiation burns or worse from fields capable of that. Most electrolysis experiments use very salty water, because normally water is not conductive enough to electrolyze strongly with a normal lab power supply. I assume you don't dump salt into your coffee.

I make the coffee using Nescafe Classic, granules, cold water from the tap and one teaspoon of white sugar. In this case I used bottled water as we did not have water at the tap. Never cream, never milk. So, while I don’t exclude the possibility of oily compounds in the coffee, I have never visually observed any prior films that might show a faint iridescence on the surface which could indicate the presence of oil or glycerine. The coffee probably foams due to water pressure, water ph, chlorine content, and maybe the sugar or sweetener and it becomes viscous and flocculant while stirring. The metallic teaspoon left in the coffee seems to help the surface coffee to preferentially orient themselves on radial converging paths. I find that funny and wired.