After visiting the PBS Kids Activity Site Ella decided to choose the experiment that shows us how to make an egg float. Below is the video of the event. It takes a few minutes to get to the payoff (i.e. floating egg) but it is pretty cool once the egg floats and the unprovoked commentary cracked us up. Oh and it takes a lot of salt. The point is to make freshwater dense enough to make the egg float.
Here’s PBS’s much more informative take:
“Ready for us to float the science scoop? Adding salt to the water squishes more molecules into the water. This makes the water more dense. When there was no salt in the water, the egg was more dense than the water and it sank. Adding salt to the water makes the water more dense than the egg which makes the egg float. If you weigh a cup of saltwater and a cup of fresh water, the saltwater will weigh more than the fresh water even though it is taking up the same amount of space (a cup). This is because the saltwater is more dense than the fresh water”
Here is a link to the project:
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