For my tenth experiment, I microwaved soap! WHAT? Just bear with me.
I dug out the different soaps from my science supply box. I had five different brands of soap as my test subjects.
As you can see they are all different but the best smelling one, in my taste, was the Zest.
I then took a big bowl of water and put the bars of soap in.
I first grabbed the Dial soap and placed it in the water… it sunk. I then placed in all the other soaps except the Ivory soap and they all sank.
Then I placed the Ivory soap and it floated!!
MIND…
BLOWN!
Why was the ivory soap the only soap that floated? Hold your horses for a moment.
I took out all the bars of soap. It was a slippery situation. Very difficult indeed.
Taking the slippery ivory soap, I placed it on a plate and cut it into fourths. It was very easy to cut.
Then I placed it into our microwave.
I set the microwave for 1 min. As the microwave slowly heated the soap, it began to expand! Bigger and bigger! It almost fell off the plate! Here is what it looked like afterwards.
Before and after
That is SO cool! Mr. Spangler then challenges us to go further and do the same thing to the other soaps. Would there be the same result? See for yourself.
As you can see the result was not the same. The Zest and Dial soap (two left) had a little sizzling but the Dove and Caress (two right) had no result but got very warm.
Why did the ivory soap float when the others didn’t? The answer is simply that the Ivory soap is less dense than water. Well, duh! That is why anything floats on water. Part of the reason it is less dense is that the Ivory soap is fiercely whipped into submission. As a result the soap has tons of little air pockets. That is why it was so easy to cut through. The other soap were so darn tough to cut! Anyway, it is because of the little air pockets, the Ivory soap acted as it did in the microwave. The effect is a demonstration of Charles’ Law, which states that as temperature of a gas increases, so does it’s volume. In other words, when a gas (such as air) heats up, it expands, takes up more room. So that is why the Ivory soap “blew up”. All of the air in the air pockets got heated up in the microwave and expanded. This is SO COOL!
