Make an Egg Float in Water
Eggs don't float... or do they? Try this fun, hand on experiment to see the difference a bit of salt can make to an egg's ability to float. Eggs normally sink when you put them in a volume of ordinary drinking water, but you can make the egg float by using salt to play around with the water's density!
Materials
1 egg
1 tall, clear drinking glass filled with tap water
Lots of salt
A tablespoon
[image1]
Set up
Fill the drinking glass with ordinary drinking water.
Gently place the egg in the glass to see what happens. Oh no! The egg sinks. But that's ok, because we expected that to happen. The egg is denser than the ordinary water, so it sinks to the bottom.
[image2 Sinking]
Remove the egg from the glass.
Add salt to the water. Start with about 6 tablespoons of salt. Use the tablespoon to mix the salt into the water.
Try the egg in the water to see if it floats or sinks. If the egg still sinks, remove is from the water and mix in more salt.
Keep testing the egg to see if if floats, and adding more and more salt, until the egg floats in the top of the glass!
[image5 Floating!]
How it works
The egg is denser than ordinary tap water, so it sinks to the bottom - there's nothing to hold it up!
But, when the salt is added to the water, the water turns more and more salty. Salt water is much denser than normal tap water. The denser the liquid, the easier it is for something to float within it! Think of it a little as if the egg suddenly has something tougher to hold it up.
When the egg is lowered into the water, it will sink through tap water until it reaches salty water. Then, the salty water is dense enough to hold up the egg and make it float!
For something even more amazing, try adding the salt to the water without mixing. This will let the salty water settle at the bottom half of the glass, with ordinary tap water in the top half of the glass, so that the egg can float in the middle of the glass! It will fall through the drinking water and then be held up by the dense salty water!
#science
#egg
#salt_water
%kidfun
241767 - 2023-07-18 05:23:31
