This Is the Best Way to Drop an Egg Without Breaking It, According to Scientists Experiments challenge the commonly held idea that dropping an egg vertically will help prevent it from cracking in a classic school assignment The researchers conducted static compression tests to measure the force needed to break the eggs in different positions. MIT The egg drop challenge is a common fixture in STEM classes. Students are tasked with designing a cushion around an egg that prevents it from cracking when dropped from a height. Conventional wisdom suggests that positioning the egg vertically will increase the chance of keeping its shell intact. Now, researchers say that long-held assumption might not be accurate. After leading MIT college students in egg drop competitions during freshman orientation, some engineers decided to examine the science behind the task. Their work, which suggests eggs dropped horizontally are less likely to crack, was published last week in the journal Communications Physics. “Every year, we follow the scientific literature and talk to the students about how to position the egg to avoid breakage on impact,” says Tal Cohen, an engineering professor at MIT, in a statement. “But about three years ago, we started to question whether vertical really is stronger.” Dynamic Drop Test Experiment Watch on So, Cohen and her team took their curiosity to the lab. First, they crushed 60 eggs in a series of static compression tests designed to measure the force needed to break them, both horizontally and vertically. The researchers found that roughly the same force—around 45 newtons—was needed to crack the eggs regardless of orientation, but the horizontal eggs compressed more before breaking. Then, they dropped 180 eggs from three short heights, all under half an inch, and in various orientations—horizontal, vertical with the wide end down and vertical with the narrow end down. The team found that the eggs dropped on their sides were least likely to crack. The fact that the horizontally dropped eggs compress more is a key difference. Humans use a similar shock-absorbing technique with our legs, as Joseph Bonavia, a study co-author and engineering graduate student at MIT, tells Veronique Greenwood at the New York Times. “If you are falling from a height, you don’t want to lock your knees. You’ll break your bones,” he explains. “You want to bend your knees—that’s what the egg is doing.” “The common sense is that the egg in the vertical direction is stronger than if you lay the egg down. But they proved that’s not the case,” says Marc Meyers, a materials scientist at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the study, to Adithi Ramakrishnan at the Associated Press. When cooking or baking, we usually crack eggs on their sides. That might be the reason behind the belief that the side of an egg is more fragile, says Brendan M. Unikewicz, a graduate student and study co-author, to the New York Times. “But that’s not the same as resisting impact,” he explains in the statement. “Cracking an egg for cooking involves applying locally focused force for a clean break to retrieve the yolk, while its resistance to breaking from a drop involves distributing and absorbing energy across the shell.” Because the eggs were dropped from such low heights, the team can’t confirm that their results would hold up under traditional egg drop challenge conditions, which might send the eggs falling from the top of a ladder or building. But the study is a reminder of the importance of challenging commonly held notions, the researchers say, even though it can be hard to secure funding to test ideas that are widely thought to be already confirmed. “We hope our work inspires students to stay curious, question even the most familiar assumptions and continue thinking critically about the physical world around them,” Cohen says in the statement. “That’s what we strive to do in our group—constantly challenge what we’re taught through thoughtful inquiry.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.