On Tuesday, 16 April 2013 09:56:14 UTC+10, Julian Vrieslander wrote:
> Cindy Fuller > wrote:
>
> > Cooking or baking is a great (and reasonably priced) way to teach
> > chemistry and physics. All of the rules apply.
>
> Certainly. If Cindy had studied physics, she wouldn't need those 500
> cookbooks. Give me my classical and quantum mechanics texts, maybe a
> tome or two on thermo and biochem, and I can derive all those recipes
> from first principles.

Now that I would like to see! I think that the thermo and chem is more central, and still one will miss the social and aesthetic component.

Still, there's lots of good education stuff in cooking. One of the best student assignments I saw last year was on cooking steaks: numerical solution of the time-dependent heat equation to predict optimum flipping times, and experiment test.