How can you tell whether an egg is boiled or not?

I think this is a pretty bad way to start the day. My crispbread and avocado are ready. Ready to be topped with a perfectly boiled egg. I gently crack it on the countertop and horror: my egg is raw (and the countertop is a mess). Picked the wrong one. I know, #firstworldproblems… But still. They deserve a solution too. I dove into the egg mystery. Make good use of it!

From the outside, they look exactly the same: a boiled egg and a raw egg. And yet you can tell whether an egg is boiled without cracking it, as I learned.

Fidget egg

Remember the fidget spinner? That spinning thing? You’re going to do that with an egg now too. Because the secret lies in the way your egg moves. Take a raw egg and a boiled egg (and make sure you know ‘who is who’, otherwise you’ll be back where you started). Then spin them both and tap them. One of the eggs will then stop spinning. Not only is it the loser of the race, it’s also your hard-boiled egg. Voila!

All well and good, but how does that work? I hear you thinking, and here’s the answer. It’s because the insides of the two eggs are different. The inside of a raw egg is liquid and separate from the shell. The inside of a boiled egg is attached to the shell. Anyway, that’s why they react differently when tapped. The boiled egg stops immediately because it forms one solid whole. The raw egg keeps spinning because its liquid interior continues to spin for a little while.

Mystery solved, I’m off to have breakfast.