Speaking as a female scientist, I'm annoyed by the ghastly prancing
woman in a bra, in the sense that I'd vaguely like to kick whoever's
idea it was where he keeps his brain.. but actually the thing that's
annoyed me enough to make me contribute a first-time post to this list
is that this is almost a really nice piece of scientific investigation
but falls at the last hurdle all along the line.
They show that the soda water on its own doesn't work so well, and which
of the ingredients help make it work better, but they leave the viewer
still thinking that there's something special about those ingredients,
failing to make (and test) the logical next step that probably lots of
other things would work.. infact, that the effect is almost certainly
one of improving the stability of the bubbles (lowering the surface
tension) and the best additive would probably be soap of some sort
(washing up liquid...).
And then again with the mentoes, they show that both the ingredients of
mentoes work, and then say that it's probably nucleation sites and add a
waxed mento that doesn't work... so there are no nucleation sites but
also no contact with the mento ingredients they've shown to work. Plus
(so I'm told), mentoes which are already wet don't work so it quite
likely isn't so much nucleation sites as the fact that tiny bubbles are
carried in on the surface of the sweets which expand to make large
bubbles and then break up leaving a small bubble still clinging to the
sweet to grow again.
The coolest thing about most of this stuff is how utterly prosaic it is,
the way it's totally comprehensible in terms of things most people have
an instinctive feeling for from every day life. And somehow these people
have managed to lose that.
Rosy Hunt
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