Penny for Thought?



For a project in Biology we did two experiments. One was to see how long you could get water to travel down a piece of string from one beaker to the other, and the other was to see how many drops of water you could get onto a penny until the water I guess you can say "overflowed". I watched as a couple of my classmates did the first experiment. I guess they were going for a world record or something because the piece of string was quite a distance between the beakers. Funny as that sounds, and as entertained as I was, I actually found the experiment interesting. I knew that water could travel down the string, but I didn't know that it could travel on a very long piece. It showed me how complex water can be, and what different shapes it can form into to adjust down the string.

The second experiment caught my attention more though. Brianna and I were lab partners and tried to beat each other out by trying to get the most drops on the penny. I don't know if I was having an off day or what, but lets just say Brianna beat me by a lot (30 to be exact). Mr. Lugwig commented that they must have been some pretty small drops because there was no way that we could get 80, but it was okay. What really surprised my during the experiment was that the penny actually held more water droplets on it than alcohol. I figured since the alcohol was thicker the cohesion would help it on the penny, but that wasn't the case. Water has an unique way of formatting itself onto the penny because of it's density and the adhesion it had, something that the alcohol couldn't do. I guess this is due to the surface tension though. I found this experiment to be really enlightening. Now when I think of water it'll give me a whole new outlook on on I perceive it :)