That shows such a poor understanding of exponential growth that it makes me think this person should not be teaching physics.
First of all, exponential growth basically doesn't ever actually occur in nature: everything has a carrying capacity. Sometimes the carrying capacity is so high it doesn't matter, but clearly in the case of the bottle it does. The growth will slow down significantly as the bacteria approaches the capacity of the bottle. The bottle could easily be half full as early as 11:30 as the available food for the bacteria starts becoming scarce enough to limit its growth.
Secondly, 2^60 bacteria would weigh about 1,100 kg. Assuming the bottle is 1L (larger than a standard wine bottle), you'd need over 1000 bottles to house that much bacteria. So no, if it doubles every minute, then the bottle has been full for the last 10 minutes.
I'm being generous and assuming some process is keeping the flask continuously well-mixed, otherwise you don't even have exponential growth in the ideal case (it's limited by the expanding surface area of the colony).
You might think I'm being pedantic, but the entire exercise is to put some "real world" context to blow the minds of people and illustrate how exponential growth "really" works. But that's not how exponential growth really works in the real world, at all. Instead it's just taking a model of spherical cows to an absurd conclusion that only serves to further confuse people's understanding of the world. It's like those awful anti-intuition-pumps (intuition sinks?) about stretching all your DNA from end-to-end.
First of all, exponential growth basically doesn't ever actually occur in nature: everything has a carrying capacity. Sometimes the carrying capacity is so high it doesn't matter, but clearly in the case of the bottle it does. The growth will slow down significantly as the bacteria approaches the capacity of the bottle. The bottle could easily be half full as early as 11:30 as the available food for the bacteria starts becoming scarce enough to limit its growth.
Secondly, 2^60 bacteria would weigh about 1,100 kg. Assuming the bottle is 1L (larger than a standard wine bottle), you'd need over 1000 bottles to house that much bacteria. So no, if it doubles every minute, then the bottle has been full for the last 10 minutes.
I'm being generous and assuming some process is keeping the flask continuously well-mixed, otherwise you don't even have exponential growth in the ideal case (it's limited by the expanding surface area of the colony).
You might think I'm being pedantic, but the entire exercise is to put some "real world" context to blow the minds of people and illustrate how exponential growth "really" works. But that's not how exponential growth really works in the real world, at all. Instead it's just taking a model of spherical cows to an absurd conclusion that only serves to further confuse people's understanding of the world. It's like those awful anti-intuition-pumps (intuition sinks?) about stretching all your DNA from end-to-end.