martinzoo

There are some highly popular videos on Youtube with this same title. And if people think I’m going to stick a baseball in my blender, they should think again…..LOL!

This is an experiment to determine what kind of solutions will blend with each other, and which will not.

Our cast: Household ammonia, distilled white vinegar, rubbing alcohol 70%, vegetable oil, water, melted butter, food color, and dish soap.

We put 1/4 cup of each product into a jar or bowl, and then added one drop of food color. Then we mixed with the chop stick.

Of the products we tested, water blended with everything except the melted butter and the oil. The results were the same when we mixed the ammonia, vinegar, and alcohol with the butter and oil. The butter and oil did mix with each other, because ‘like mixes with like’, so their characteristics were close enough to being the same. And the water, ammonia, vinegar, and alcohol all had enough similar characteristics that they mixed together as well.

This is oil with alcohol: no blending at all.

The book explains that the reason the water-based products blend together is because they are all charged, positive to negative, in the same way. They call this being homogeneous (’homo’, from Greek, means ‘the same’ and ‘genos’, also Greek, means ‘ kind.’

Oil doesn’t mix with water-based products because it has no charge at all. So, mixing oil with water would be a heterogeneous mixture, ‘hetero’ means ‘other’.

This is a picture of the melted butter with the ammonia: again, no blending at all.

*

*

The second part of our experiment was an attempt to get the oil and water to mix.

GB once again took a small jar and added 1/4 cup of water, then a drop of food color.

Then we added a 1/4 cup of vegetable oil.

If you add soap to oil and water, it WILL blend. Why? Because the water-based molecules bond together because of their positive and negative charges. And the oil molecules bond together because they don’t have any charge at all. But when you add soap, the soap molecules are charged on one end, with no charge on the other end. So there is something in the soap molecules for the water AND oil to be attracted to, and blend with.