Run the experiments
Every scene in this story exists as a live, adjustable demo in Try — and as real solved physics in the Kitchen Lab.
06:58 · Light
Breakfast begins 150 million kilometres away.
The first thing to arrive in the kitchen is sunlight: photons that left a fusion reactor eight minutes ago, crossed a vacuum radiation can cross, and are now warming the countertop. Everything else this morning is just moving that energy around.
How light works →07:05 · Heat & phase
The kettle climbs — then flatly refuses.
Two degrees a second, like clockwork… until 100 °C, where the temperature stalls dead while the element keeps pouring energy in. Watch the curve: that plateau is latent heat, the price of turning liquid into steam.
The heat & phase lesson →07:09 · Radiation
The toaster cooks without touching.
No contact, no hot air worth mentioning — the glowing elements pour infrared straight across the gap, and only the faces that can see them brown. Then a spring, held back all this time, gets its moment.
Inside the toaster →07:12 · Thermodynamics
The fridge pays for every open-door second.
Cold isn't a thing you make — it's heat you remove, and removing it costs work. Every joule the milk loses, plus the compressor's wages, streams out of the coils at the back. The kitchen always ends up warmer.
The heat pump →07:15 · Waves
The plates announce themselves twice.
Once on impact, once on return: sound spreads as a pressure wave, bounces off the tiled wall, and arrives back at your ears milliseconds later. Kitchens sound "clattery" because hard surfaces reflect; curtains would forgive.
Sound & flow →07:18 · Fluids
The tap crosses a threshold science still can't fully solve.
Open it gently: a glassy, laminar column. Keep going and — past a critical Reynolds number — it shivers into turbulence, the same transition that governs blood, pipelines, and weather. You demonstrate it every time you rinse a plate.
The faucet →Keep going
You just watched six phenomena. Now drive them.
Walk the kitchen in 3D
The 3D kitchen has all of this morning's protagonists as animated stations, with a guided tour.
Prove it
Fifteen questions across every topic in the exam — score 80% and print your certificate.