It’s Hanukkah, and in my house that means it’s time to celebrate with science! Tonight, we poured some bubbly and drowned our…raisins. Well, we tried to drown them, but raisins are surprisingly good swimmers. In the video above, my five-year-old explains how “The Raisin Lifting Experiment” works, but even after the experiment was finished and the candles on the menorah were long gone, we were still chatting away about density, volume, buoyancy, and carbonation. Who knew that tossing a few wrinkled snacks into some fizzy-lifting drink could turn into a conversation about the origins of life on Earth?
The instructions for this experiment are simple (materials are in bold):
- Pour clear soda into a clear container.
- Drop raisins in soda.
- Observe!
For more non-traditional holiday fun, try build a blast-off balloon, sink the Tinfoil Titanic, get a sugar rush from edible mathematics, and concoct a liquid rainbow.
