Mentos + Diet Coke = Fun
What do you get when you take The Fresh Maker ® and The Real Thing ® and put them together?
My wife and I heard about this recently on the popular show Myth Busters, and after seeing it, we had to try it out.
Lucky for me, I had a professor that needed a 3 liter bottle. After stopping at four different stores to secure a package of Mentos, the experiment was ready. A biology party was the perfect setting.
So what does it look like?
Here’s a closeup of that same shot:
Also, I’ve added a series of photos in the gallery showing the progression as the eruption occurred. The whole thing is extremely fast. It’s over within one to two seconds.
So how does it work?
Upon adding three or four Mentos to the Diet Coke, what happens is that virtually all of the carbon dioxide is released from the Diet Coke in an extremely short amount of time. The resulting pressure forces the liquid out of the bottle with surprising force, resulting in the geyser.
More specifically, the tiny holes on the surface of the Mentos serve as a nucleation site, facilitating the rapid formation and release of tiny bubbles of CO2.
Wikipedia has an article on the subject, with more detailed information on the science behind it.
It’s fun, it’s cheap, you should try it. Just not inside.
Have you seen the video of the well choreagraphed series of explosions?
This trick works well for a 15 year birthday party…
when he came home the Monday morning after he asked” what did you do at my Party. you guys had more fun than I did!” Teehee…his friends don’t know yet how to create excitement. Someone has to teach them!
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5458431
check it out….It is fabulous!
Explosively your pal,
Liz
I’ve been dying to try this since I heard about it last year.
Great gloopy photograph of the foam! What was the shutter speed, and how many frames per second does your new camera do?
Thanks Liz. That was a great video, and through that link, I found this video of a women who tried to do the experiment in her stomach. The result was not quite what I expected, and I burst into laughter.
Keith, when in the picture gallery, you’ll see a little camera icon underneath each individual full sized picture. By clicking, you can see the details of the shot as recorded by the camera.
So that shot was taken with a shutter speed of 1/500th of a sec. The whole thing lasts literally one second. The last picture is two seconds after the first, but I had a brief pause as the camera had to pause a bit and catch up… So perhaps call it 1.5 seconds?
It can do 5 frames a second, for about 10 or 11 shots if I’m shooting in RAW (uncompressed) format. If I’m shooting jpeg (which I never do), I think it can shoot something like 25 or 30 shots in a row, 5 frames a second. The lightning fast focus and rapid frame rate make it so much more likely to capture something fast moving than with the old camera.
An interesting variation on the Diet Coke and Mentos theme…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJsDfLndlKU&mode=related&search=
danggg thats hottt:]