The Acid Attack on Pi Day
STEM Fair day couldn’t have gone better!
Alright guys, happy International Pi Day! 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510 is difficult to memorize, but some people did it! By the way, those people do NOT include me. I only got the first thirteen digits down; 3.141592653589, nothin’ else. But let’s cut to the chase.
So today, Pi Day, was actually my STEM Fair at my school! It wasn’t a competition, but if it was, I would have won. What was my project, anyways? I thought you’d never ask.
Have you ever heard of a naked egg? You probably have, and I was trying to find out what causes an egg to become all squishy. So I started doing some intense experimenting, testing, and googling, until I finally found out why.
Basically, you make a naked egg by submerging it in strong acids like vinegar and waiting for a few days. After you take the egg out, it’ll be all rubbery, squishy, bouncy, or even sometimes translucent! But why? Let’s see my findings!
So, as usual, I took the experiment to the next level; submerging three eggs in three different liquids. I used water, pepsi, and vinegar for my STEM fair. Before the experiment, I had a few questions that I jotted down. A few of them were, ‘Will the pH of different liquids make a noticiable impact?’ and ‘Could other liquids create a naked egg?’ I did two trials, and found some egg-celent results.
So what happened to the water egg? Nothing! Water has no acidity, so nothing happened to the egg. But the pepsi egg turned brown! Trust me, I’m serious. I’m not yolking around! Pepsi actually has a low pH level; 2.5! So it’s VERY acidic, but we don’t feel the acids when we drink pepsi because the phosphoric acid, the citric acid, and all of the others are diluted by the high amounts of fructose sugar and many other unhealthy things. But the vinegar was the only one that made a squishy naked egg. And now for my favorite part… Why?
Look, all of this is interconnected with chemistry. pH just stands for ‘power of Hydrogen,’ or the amounts of free-floating hydrogen ions in any given liquid. A liquid on the pH scale can either be acidic of basic. An acid has a pH of something less than 7, and basic is something more than 7. But what about 7? Any drink that has a pH of 7 is considered neutral, like water. And since water is neutral, it has no acids or bases to react with the calcium carbonate in the eggshell. But pepsi does, so it’s caramel coloring seeps into the eggshell and turns it brown. What about vinegar?
With a pH of 2, and no sugars to dilute the acetic acids in vinegar, vinegar can easily gnaw it’s way through an eggshell in just 36 hours! The acetic acid is a solvent, and the eggshell acts as a solute. When the two combine, a chemical reaction takes place. On a molecular scale, when the two come in contact, a reaction happens and carbon dioxide gas is formed. And those are the bubbles you can physically see from your perspective; when an egg drops into vinegar, you can clearly see the bubbles forming on the vinegar’s surface and on the eggshell. It’s carbon dioxide!
After all this researching, you might ask, what’s the whole point of this? There are two key takeaways here;
- In my project, the eggs were substituting teeth. So you should NOT drink acidic and unhealthy things on a regular basis. And after you drink an acidic liquid like pepsi, brush your teeth soon afterwards. You don’t have any idea how much it helps!
- Pi Day is like a miracle day. Literally at least fifty people came to my stall at the fair, and all of them loved my project. I guess the power of Pi can be stronger the battery acid, which has a pH of dead zero. And by dead zero, I mean zero as in it’s pH is actually 0 and dead as in it can kill you. But Pi is stronger!
So chemistry can be pretty fun, especially when you get to use it on eggs — OH DARN, MY NAKED EGG POPPED!
