The science of Monkey Island: can grog dissolve a metal mug that fast?
a day ago
- Grog from The Secret of Monkey Island corrodes pewter mugs rapidly, with a measured mug lifetime of about 35 seconds in the game.
- The author models grog as an acid solution and uses diffusion-limited proton transport to estimate the required acid concentration, finding it far exceeds plausible aqueous acid levels (around 383 M).
- The study concludes that ordinary acid chemistry cannot explain grog's corrosivity under the stagnant diffusion model, suggesting possible oxidative mechanisms or the unknown ingredient SCUMM.
- The model is compared with real corrosion data for tin and steel, showing order-of-magnitude agreement without adjustable parameters, but the author notes this does not confirm proton diffusion as the rate-limiting step.