Watch as a hard-boiled egg gets sucked into a bottle in this cool experiment!
Topics: Expansion/contraction of air with temperature change
Difficulty: Easy to perform and see results
Materials:
An empty glass bottle narrow neck
Hard-boiled egg with the shell removed
Small piece of paper
Lighter
Procedure
1.Take the bottle and place it on the table
2. Take a hard-boiled egg and place it on top of the bottle. Check to make sure the egg can sit comfortably on top of the bottle without falling. However, the reaction will break the egg and not work if the bottle has too narrow of a neck.
2. Using the lighter, light a small piece of paper on fire and drop it into the glass container. You may want to have an adult or parent do this step.
3. Immediately place the egg on top of the bottle.
4. Watch as the cool reaction occurs!
How It Works:
When you put the lighted paper in the glass bottle, the air in the bottle starts heating up. Hot air expands and it escapes out of the bottle by pushing the egg. This is the reason why we initially see the egg start vibrating.
Next, as the fire progresses on the paper, it consumes oxygen. We see that all the oxygen has been consumed once the fire goes out. With the fire put out, the air in the bottle cols down. Since cold air occupies less space, there is less pressure in the bottle. As a result, there is more air pressure outside the bottle. Due to this unevenness of pressure, in order to make the egg gets pulled inside the bottle.
Additional Experiments:
Note: The reverse is also true where you can push the egg out of the bottle by increasing the pressure in the bottle. In order to do this, keep the bottle up side down and blow air into it. This will increase the pressure inside and the egg will pop out.
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