What did I want to do on a windy Sunday afternoon? Put several cans of soda in a big bucket of water! Sounds fun right? Maybe not to you but for me, it was an adventure! Allow me to explain. I filled my big bucket full of water and gathered the various kinds of soda we bought.
I put my test subjects into the water. Why? Bear with me, I’ll explain later. Observe, then learn. Now, observe what you see when I put the sodas in the water.
These pictures are just a little fuzzy but at least you can tell what is going on. In the picture on the top right, the background is my t-shirt! So as you can see some of the cans floated and some did not. Why? Well notice the ones that are floating Diet Coke, Coke Zero, and Dr. Pepper Cherry. The Coke Zero and the Diet Coke have sweetener, not tons of sugar like the ones that sunk which are Dr. Pepper, Cream Soda, and the Root Beer. I will make a note that I tilted the cans so that the air bubble under the can escaped.
The Dr. Pepper Cherry, however, I cannot explain! I was TOTALLY expecting it to sink. But NO! It wanted to float even though it has more sugar and sodium than the regular Dr Pepper! Because of the strange anomaly I grabbed two more cans of Dr. Pepper Cherry to just see if that one can was being a weirdo! I placed them in the tank of water and looked at the bizarre results.
I HAVE NO WORDS!!!!!! Except one……. WHY?!?!
Moving on, Mr. Spangler challenged his readers to then add salt to the water and see if it changes the results. I added salt in 1/2 cup increments. I added the first 1/2 cup to the tank and stirred. I had kind of a evil villain moment….
After I put the cans in, this was the result.
The Dr. Pepper is floating, though the root beer and the cream soda are still at the bottom of the bucket. Lets look at the results when I added another 1/2 cup, 1 cup total.
So no new cans floated but one of the cool aspects that we cannot capture in pictures is that each time I added salt, the cans sank to the bottom more slowly. Okay another 1/2 cup salt, total 1 1/2 cups (let’s see if I can persuade the root beer and cream soda to float, they were so close!)
The cream soda gave in! The root beer wanted to float but gave up. Let us see if some more salt will help the poor darling. Total-2 cups of salt.
WAHAHAHA!! I was really excited to see the two cans floating… So happy I felt like dancing!
Now lets get to the science of it! I mentioned at the beginning that this is a density experiment. The reason some of the cans sunk is that the cans are more dense than the water. The cans that floated were the same or less dense than the water. Now when we added the salt, we were making the water more dense. By raising the density of the water the previously sunk sodas became less dense than the salt+water and rose to the surface!! That is SO cool. The only thing that I am confused with is that rule-breaking Cherry Soda!!! ONE DAY I will know (queue dramatic music)……
