Igniting the mix of hydrogen and air caused the eggs to explode. The whole thing was enclosed in a plastic bag, so that when the egg blew apart, the researchers could collect all the fragments and measure their sizes.

They found that as the explosive pressure increased, there were more fragments, but fewer large pieces.

Eggs catapulted on to the ground by rubber bands also broke into a predictable distribution of pieces, but generally there were fewer bits than after an explosion.
Breaking up

The mathematical equations that predict the number of pieces of each size can be described by something called a power law, the team reports in a paper on the physics website arXiv.