Science confirms that it's impossible to achieve perfect Oreo separation
At long last, we know for sure that human error alone isn't responsible for Oreo mangling
Just like all divorces that begin with an assurance that “we’ll do it without a lawyer or arguments unlike all those other couples,” it’s always much more difficult to cleanly, equitably separate the two sides of an Oreo than it seems like it should be.
Now, in a move that rudely interferes with everyone’s ability to make excuses that they’re only buying five boxes of the cookies to practice their splitting technique, a scientific study has found it’s impossible to break apart an Oreo so that the filling distributes evenly on both halves.
An article from Vice lays out exactly how we now know this fact, detailing the groundbreaking work of MIT mechanical engineering PhD candidate and Oreologist Crystal Owens. Owens, driven by a desire to know if it’s only human error standing in the way of a perfect Oreo split, led a team of researchers in a study determined to uncover the possibility of the Platonic half-Oreo.
Yesterday, the Physics Of Fluids journal published her findings in an article titled “On Oreology, The Fracture And Flow Of ‘Milk’s Favorite Cookie®.” In it, we see the (properly reviewed) findings of a study that involved using a device called a rheometer, which “measures torque and viscosity of various substances”—including Oreos.
With help from a 3D printed Oreometer, Owens and her team conducted many experiments that attempted to achieve an equal filling split. They tried “different Oreo flavors and filling quantities,” adjusted Oreometer rotation rates, and introduced milk dipping as a variable. “In essentially all possible twisting configurations,” Owens says, “the creme tends to delaminate from one wafer, resulting in one nearly bare wafer and one with almost all the creme.”
In short: Even with high-tech equipment used in controlled experiments there is no way to achieve a perfect Oreo split. Doing so remains outside the realm of human power.
Read the rest of the article for more details on Owens’ study and, toward the end, a brief aside about similar experiments she and her team conducted that sought to answer the age-old question of how long an Oreo should be dunked in milk to achieve an ideal taste/consistency ratio.
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