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Track my flight and argue about egg timers (Patreon)

Published:
2025-11-17 19:49:36
Imported:
2025-11

Poll

Track my flight and argue about egg timers

  • Faster 48
  • Slower 209
  • The same 157
  • 2025-11-17
  • 414 votes
{'title': 'Track my flight and argue about egg timers', 'choices': [{'text': 'Faster', 'votes': 48}, {'text': 'Slower', 'votes': 209}, {'text': 'The same', 'votes': 157}], 'closes_at': None, 'created_at': datetime.datetime(2025, 11, 17, 19, 46, 8, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc), 'description': None, 'allow_multiple': False, 'total_votes': 414}

Content

Tomorrow (Tuesday 18 November) I'm going on the ESA/Novespace AirZeroG flight to experience lunar gravity! You can track my flight.Video: https://youtu.be/W6j-s9Qn9VYTrack my flight F-HNOV: https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/f-hnov

I am taking a one-minute egg timer with me. Can you predict if under lunar gravity will it run at a different speed to what it does on Earth? Vote now if an egg timer on the Moon will run:

Comments

Phil Brady

Is it a sand-grain or spring-wound egg timer? Is the inside of the egg timer a vacuum, filled with standard air at 1 atm, or some other combination of gases and pressure? What's the precision of the egg timer, and when was it last certified? These sort of pedantic questions are vital to answering this question, and are the bread and butter of your channel, sir!

André Forcier

Don’t think an egg timer is sensitive enough to measure any difference. Also your time in “zero g” in total, isn’t very long time wise. Now if it was an atomic clock, maybe a very very very small difference. Well less then just flying would. 🤷‍♂️ Well I just watch the beginning of the vid. I thought it was a mechanical one. See it’s an sandglass timer, changing my vote… think it will “run” really drop at slower rate then a full 1G.

Moondigger

Acceleration due to gravity is dependent on the gravitational force. A feather and a hammer fall at the same rate in a vacuum (famously tested on the Apollo 15 mission), but they fell more slowly than they would on Earth. Look for the video -- it's on YouTube. (ETA: Therefore I think the egg timer will run more slowly in Lunar gravity.)

Rowan Wagstaff-Weston

Assuming this is a sand egg timer (as opposed to clockwork or electronic), I would say it would have to run slower... leaving aside the fluid dynamics of sand passing through a gap because it is far too complicated for me, we can start from the axiom that the sand will not flow in zero gravity. Therefore, there must either be a sharp cutoff at zero - which seems unlikely - or the speed of flow must follow some continuous function relative to gravitational acceleration, in which case reducing gravity would also slow the timer.

l.h. riley

Can you describe the egg timer device? Is it digital or mechanical? Does it use springs? Gravity?

SkaveRat

it's a sand timer, as seen in the video

Peter Freese

I think it might depend on the type of egg timer: digital? sand in hourglass? oscillating flywheel?

Moondigger

It's shown in the video. It's a sand-though-an-hourglass style timer.

André Forcier

Just saw that, needed to change my vote…🙄🤪

DrDelvan

Answered slower, assuming its a sand timer. I'd opt for "The same" if its a spring-wound timer.

Andreas Hammargren

I'm also on a flight tomorrow, albeit a much less interesting one.

André Forcier

The vid shows a sand minute timer. ⏳

mlc

i think you're right and also predicted "slower", but there is some possibility that the continuous function has a peak at like 0.1g for some reason i can't fathom (possibly related to the aforementioned fluid dynamics of the gap?) and that 0.17g is faster than 1.0g

Robert Long

What is this, Steve Mould's Patreon?? This is a great question though; the limiting cases are interesting to think about. I couldn't think of a way to simulate low gravity at home, but high gravity is pretty simple by swinging it around on a piece of string. I was able to make a 2 minute sand timer go in 20 seconds. So I'm gonna go with slower.

Aric

Hmmm... my first thought is that it would flow slower at 1/6g because at 0g there would be no gravity to pull the sand downwards and at 1g it works just fine. But, after thinking for a bit more, I started to wonder if the main thing controlling the sand's flow rate through the timer is the friction within the system (sand to sand particle friction, and sand to glass friction). So in that case, less gravity could mean faster flow due to the sand particles exerting less friction force on each other, leading to better flow. You could also think of this in the reverse direction too, when under higher gravity (maybe 3g or 4g) the particles could start to "pack" themselves together simply due to the increased weight they would experience and thus the flow would slow down or stop all together. So my guess (and I could be entirely wrong) is that there is a perfect amount of gravity somewhere between 0g and 3 or 4 g where the friction inside the sand is low enough to encourage good flow, but also strong enough to pull the sand through. No idea if its 1/6g or 1g. Will be interesting to find out! Thanks Matt for this fun little thought experiment! Have fun and don't get motion sick!

Ken Lowe

I'm going with the same since the speed of sand is constrained by the size of the aperture in the neck of the hour-glass (minute-glass?) construction and not how fast the sand falls. If I'm correct we won't be able to tell, however, because it could be argued that one (or three) minutes is not enough time to measure the difference with the accuracy of whatever stopwatch Matt is going to use. If it were an atomic clock on the actual moon, it would also "be the same" since Steve Mould showed us that the moon and earth both travel the same distance as they make a one-year orbit around the sun, with the moon sometimes ahead of, and sometimes behind the earth in their orbit, but the moon never actually orbits the earth.

Moondigger

I started typing a post to suggest this kind of experiment, but then I saw your post. Nicely done.

James Clare

Just googled egg time there are ones that change colour, egg shaped timer and I guess the sand based timer, so gravity and pressure would be different but a egg shaped timer should be the same

Moondigger

It's a sand-though-hourglass style. it's in the video.

Bartosz Błaszkiewicz

It depends on what speed you mean. It is possible that grains will fall with smaller velocity, but the grain rate stays roughly similar. A little slower maybe. Insignificant until velocity slows down much more.

Bartosz Błaszkiewicz

Let's just appreciate the fact that Matt posted a link to YouTube video so that I can tap it and go directly to YouTube app instead of waiting for the video to load in Patreon only to click the YouTube button that will take me to the YouTube app. Then having to pause the video in YouTube app because I need to go back to Patreon to close the video and only then I can start watching on YouTube. Maybe I have a little OCD but I have my particular way I watch my videos and I hate it when apps try to make me happier against my wish.

Bartosz Błaszkiewicz

Let me underline significant difference. We have two distinct speeds here. One is the velocity of falling grains and it is affected by gravity very much. The other is the flow rate of how many grains fall per unit time. (Yeah, I mentioned it in another comment, but I want to elaborate this particular point). Under Earths gravity the time it takes for a grain to fall is insignificant. Slowing the falling grains may cause a clog at the choke point and slow down the flow rate. Also, slower velocity may add significant time to the timer.

Pierre D.

These planes are not in 0g for the whole flight. When you go back down you “compensate” for the missed Gs. Kind of like a swing in a park. Depending on the duration of the parabolas and, arguably, the pilot, the average gravity might average to just about 1G over the entire flight. So I’ll say “same”.

DScott

I'm voting "same time", thinking it's in a vaccuum. Eggs boil at different speeds at different altirudes, though time is fairly constant. Keen to be wrong and learn why. Does this mean the egg came first if we're testing an egg timer instead of a chicken timer? And Matt will test that on a subsequent flight?

Rick Rubenstein

It won’t run at all. Egg timers don’t have legs. 🥚 🚫🦵

Gunstick

What about a pendulum clock?

Gunstick

Oh, what kind of egg timer??? The wind-up kind or the hourglass type? I would call the latter hourglass and not egg timer.

Jessica Flores

According to the video, it’s an hourglass shape. Not what I would have called an egg timer.

Colin Ries

Never having used one, I googled it. Seemingly modern ones work based on temperature, so it won't work at all. If it's a sandglass, it would obviously run much slower at lower gravity, trending to not at all in 0G. If it's pendulum spring, it should work just the same.

Peter Freese

Beverloo's law predicts that the sandtimer will run significantly slower in lunar gravity. I think there's a thermal factor to consider as well -- in colder temperatures the grain-grain friction increases and the timer runs even slower.

Peter Freese

mass flow rate ∝ (g)^(0.5+β)

Matthew Anderson

Ah, the old "make a physics question go viral by using vague terms with unclear definitions" trick. 😅

Jeff Raymakers

Assuming an ideal egg timer, general relativity predicts that it will run faster in the lower lunar gravity. For a Parker egg timer, all bets are off.

Pepijn Schmitz

By "egg timer", do you mean an hourglass? That would run slower on the moon, I guess. To me an "egg timer" is a little wind up clock. That would run the same.

Stuart Ward

The flow of "sand" through the neck or constriction is the determiner of the time, My thought is that this will only marginally depend on the gravitational force. So roughly the same time in 1/6G as 1G. It wont flow at all under 0G but I think the flow rate will be largely independent of gravity until some critical point in which the flow stops.

Stuart Ward

You should teat it on the up swing part of the flight as well when you are experiencing more than 1G.

Stuart Ward

After looking at the paper linked by @Peter Freese the analysis says it will be running at /12 speed under 0.3G so I predict the minute timer will take 2 minutes to run. IE slower...

Tiago

The question is odd, shouldn't it be "faster/slower IN RELATION TO“ something?

Moondigger

Faster or slower IN RELATION TO the rate it runs in 1 G. In other words, does sand fall through an hourglass faster, slower, or at the same rate on the moon (in 1/6 G) than it does on Earth (in 1 G)?

Tiago

Yes, but who's observing it? Do we have a clock on Earth, and one on the Moon, and are we looking at them from the Earth? Or from the Moon? Or from the middle point? The question is so vague it's impossible to answer. The clock, looking in a mirror, will say "I'm running at 1s/s". Someone on Earth will say something different looking at the clock on the Moon.

William Clark

Since it is likely uses a spring and some sort of racheting mechanism, that may have an unexpected impact on the results. I think the real struggle is, I'm not a physicist or mathematics expert

Moondigger

Looks like this discussion petered out a couple weeks ago, but somehow I missed your reply here. Matt's experiment was (hopefully?) conducted a couple weeks ago when he did his flight on the 'vomit comet.' This is an airplane flown on a parabolic path which allows the occupants to experience weightlessness (usually) or (in Matt's case) 1/6 G to simulate the gravity felt on the moon. On that flight, Matt planned to run a 1 minute egg timer (sand-through-the-hourglass style) and see if it would run out faster than 1 minute, slower than 1 minute, or exactly 1 minute. To answer your specific questions: 1. Matt is observing it, and (hopefully) we will be able to observe it on video. 2. No, this experiment does not use clocks, and this is not about relativity. It's about how long it will take an egg timer to run out in 1/6 G (moon gravity, but simulated in the airplane). 3. The question as stated in this Patreon post is a little vague, but watching the linked video provides added context so that it's easier to understand what this is all about. Hopefully Matt's video documenting his day on the vomit comet will be published soon, so we can see the results.