Monday, August 2, 2010

Magic: Run Away Pepper

We used a bowl of water, a sprinkle of pepper and detergent to experiment with surface tension.
We put some water in a bowl and then sprinkled it with pepper. Next we put a drop of detergent into the centre of the bowl. What happened?  Did the pepper change?
Yes. The pepper zoomed away from the detergent.
This is because the soap breaks the surface tension of the water and the tension on the rest of the water pulls the floating pepper away from the soap. 

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