Thursday, November 11, 2010

Cornstarch; Liquid or Solid?



The corn starch (mixed with the right amount of water) looked like a liquid when you just see it, but when you touch it, feels like a solid. If you just rest your hands on the corn starch, your hands sink into it like if it were a liquid, but rather slowly! If you pick it up in your hands it feels a bit like a solid, but then it drips down in a gooey sort of way. If you threw it on the ground, you could pick it up almost as easily as piking up a solid, and also throwing it made it feel like more a solid! That cornstarch experiment was really awesome!!!

When there was too much water, it was more a liquid although it still had some solid 'looks&feels' for example it was hard to take of the tray and it was a bit hard to get of your fingers unlike most liquids. When there wasn't enough water, the mixture was really hard and hard to deal with. You could barely move it and pick it up because it became tough and not that soft liquid anymore. It was almost a solid when you didn't add enough water.

I think after a period of time the water evaporated or there was less because it was hard again as I mentioned above. It became really hard to scrape it of the tray with your own hands, but i don't really know if what caused that was the amount of water. The only thing I noticed happen at the end of the experiment was that it was really tough like hard clay, except worse.

When you first put this gooey mixture on your hands, it was just liquidy, if you can call it that. After a long time it started to dry up and it felt like something really smooth if you know what i mean. The feeling for me actually made me feel rather awkward! It wasn't one of the best feels, lets say that!

I don't know if this is a solid or a liquid, but to find out maybe we could boil it, and see if we know if boiling liquid is faster or if it just depends..I don't know. 

I think that this experiment was really fun and we should definitely do something like that again, you know, getting all messy! This mixture was also interesting and if I learn anything about whether it is a liquid or solid I'll write it straight away! This experiment was fun, but it also taught me a lot, or will, if I get to research about it!

I don't know if it is liquid or solid, but I hope to find out on my next blog post at Clare's Fantastic Blog!

2 comments:

  1. Hi Clare,
    I'm so impressed with your ability to remember all of your observations from the experiment. Great work on this assignment! What makes it a solid? What did you have to do with it to make it a solid? One thing you could search through is from the link that I put in the blog post. It has exact information about what type of mixture it is.

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  2. "I think after a period of time the water evaporated or there was less.......". You know how/why the water evaporated don't you (remember Uncle Paul's answer to my question on this?).

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