Dry ice is some pretty handy stuff. Aside from keeping shipments of groceries and other perishables nice and cold, it’s perfect for producing billowing smoke, which is always nice to have if you’re throwing a high school dance.
Dry ice doesn’t just have the power to compel teens to shake their bodies, though, but coins and spoons too, as shown in these awesome videos.
YouTube user Leak Fische shows that all you need to produce the natural (and dance) phenomenon is a chunk of dry ice and some pocket change. Just grab a coin, jab it into the ice, and let it go!
Instantly, the coin starts vibrating, beating out a fast-tempo rhythm as it bounces off the hard ice. But while dry ice is a mainstay of Halloween parties and haunted houses, there’s no sorcery at play here, just science.
▼ Science: It’s like magic for smart people!
Below -78.5 degrees Celsius (-109.3 degrees Fahrenheit), dry ice is solid. Once its surface temperature rises above that, it sublimates, or converts to a gas without going through a liquid state, which is why it’s called “dry” ice.
Obviously, a block of dry ice is colder than a coin you have lying around your home (and if it’s not, for God’s sakes turn the heater on). Metal acts as a thermal conductor, and stabbing the coin into dry ice causes it to rapidly sublimate, which is why you can see bits of vapor coming off it as the coin oscillates back and forth.
The specific type of metal used seems to affect how quickly the process happens. Both the 100-yen coin Leak Fische uses first and the five-yen piece shown after get up to pretty good speeds, with the hole in the middle of the latter giving it its own unique pitch. The featherweight one-yen coin, though, doesn’t do quite as well, as it stops after about two seconds.
▼ Pressing the coin into the slit does cause some screeching, but you could get the same result by stabbing a human being with it.
Of course, coins aren’t the only things made out of metal, and you can make similar things happen with a variety of objects. For example, the Raku Raku Kagaku Jikken (Easy Science Experiments) channel shows that if you lay a spoon on a block of dry ice and close your eyes, you’d swear your alarm clock was going off.
▼ Where’s the snooze button?
Proof positive that not only is science fun, it’s noisy too.
Source: Labaq
Top image: YouTube
Insert images: RocketNews24, YouTube, Wikipedia/Cmglee, YouTube (2)
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