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Kendra's picture

Water Beads

Submitted by Kendra on Wed, 10/03/2007 - 1:43pm.

From the demonstration Professor Grobstein did for our lab session, we came up with the hypothesis that since water molecules are moving constantly, small beads are more jittery than the larger beads.

By making slides for the microscope, we added water containing beads 2 microns, 4 microns and 8 microns big.

The slides containing 2 micron beads moved the fastest. Our fastest bead moved 15 micrometers in 2 minutes. When observing them, we could hardly keep up!

The 4 micron beads moved a little slower than the 2 micron beads and the fastest bead moved about 10 micrometers in 2 minutes.

Since the 8 micron beads were the largest, we found no movement at all. They simply stayed stagnant in the water.

Despite appearances, everything is moving constantly all the time. The larger the bead that we observed the less it moved and the smaller the bead, the faster it moved. Proving our hypothesis was correct.

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