Exploring Fourier methods with beer bottles
Physics Education
2025-12-16 v1 Applied Physics
Classical Physics
Abstract
As anyone who has blown across the mouth of a beer bottle knows, beer bottles have a well-defined fundamental frequency. This paper shows how a beer bottle's acoustical resonance can be modeled as a one-dimensional driven-damped oscillator and includes enough detail to be useful in undergraduate laboratory experiments. While the frequency-domain Green's function of the bottle can be extracted through sequential pure-tone measurements, sufficient data to fit the model's parameters can be collected in just a few seconds when Fourier methods are used.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2512.12312,
title = {Exploring Fourier methods with beer bottles},
author = {David Kordahl and Emma Foster},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.12312},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
7 pages, 6 figures, Forthcoming from American Journal of Physics