Ah, the holidays: friends, families…booze. During these celebratory times, Dangerous Minds readers, consider this handy, skull-cracking tip, courtesy forensic pathologist, Stephan Bolliger:
Other scientists had already calculated how much energy it takes to crack the human skull ?Ǩ between 14 and 70 joules, depending on the location ?Ǩ so all Bolliger needed to do was to take the same measurements on a beer bottle. “If the bottle is more sturdy than the skull,” he says, “then the bottle will win, and the skull will break.” Simple as that.
Bolliger, who is head of forensic pathology at the University of Bern, went to the store and picked up 10 half-liter bottles of Feldschl?ɬ?sschen Original ?Ǩ his nation’s most popular brew. He emptied six of them, left four full and, using a precisely calibrated energy-measuring device, started dropping a steel ball on the bottles from various heights. Bolliger’s conclusion: Full bottles shatter at 30 joules, empties at 40, meaning both are capable of cracking open your skull. But empties are a third sturdier.
Why the difference? The beer inside a bottle is carbonated, which means it exerts pressure on the glass, making it more likely to shatter when hitting something. Its propensity to shatter makes it less sturdy ?Ǩ and thus a poorer weapon ?Ǩ than an empty one. As for the ubiquitous half-full bottle, if you hold it like a club, Bolliger says, “it tends to become an empty bottle very rapidly.”