A friend of mine claims that if you drop ‘Mintoes’ (mint flavour) into ‘Diet Coca Cola’, it will instantly produce a fountain of cola around 6 feet high. :eek:
I happen to have bought both products and the respective main ingredients are listed as:
(Um, I’m in Flemish-speaking Belgium for a chess tournament. I guess some of the above are sugar / glucose syrup and sparkling water / aspartme sweetener)
Is there a chemical basis for this?
Otherwise I’m going to try it in my back garden when I return!
A friend of mine who does a science/“magic” show for kids (dipping a banana in liquid nitrogen and hammering a nail with it, that sort of thing) does the mentos/Coke trick as part of his act. It’s quite spectacular!
It absolutely works… did it this weekend with my son and his friends. Only takes three or four mentos before the thing is shooting. With a two liter bottle, ours was at least twn feet in the air.
It definitely works. The key to getting height is to make a tube so that you can drop ALL the Mentos into it at once. I did not realize this and only got two in before it shot 3-4 feet in the air.
I looked around the Internet after I did it, but could not find any chemical explanation. I’d be very interested to know why this happened!
There are lots of theories on the 'net - which ones are correct I’m not sure of.
Anecdotally, as a child I used to like adding those packets of sugar to my cola at restaurants and watch it fizz like crazy, so I’m betting the sugar is mainly responsible.
Hmm. It ought to be fairly easy to test 5 mints + bottle vs. 5 sugar cubes + bottle, now that I think of it…
Follow ParentalAdvisory’s link (post 2).
Apparently the Mentoes provide huge numbers of nucleation sites for bubbles to form, and shoot out of the top.
