The Science Behind This Experiment
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Why Mentos?Mentos is covered in tens of tiny layers of sugar,and has thousands of tiny pits all over the surface. These tiny pits are the nucleation sites. As soon as the Mentos hit the soda, bubbles form all over the surface of the candy. Double this with the fact that the Mentos candies are heavy and sink to the bottom of the bottle and you've got a combination of two usually adverse effects! When all this gas is released, it literally pushes all of the liquid up and out of the bottle in an incredible blast!
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What Makes It Glow?Quinine as an ingredient in the tonic water maked it glow under the blacklight/UV light, in the process of fluorescence. A material is said to be fluorescent if it emits one color of light whenever it is exposed to another colour of light from another source. In this case you are exposing quinine to ultraviolet light, the invisible element of sunlight that produces sunburns. The structure of the quinine molecule enables it to take in energy in the form of invisible UV blacklight and immediately transmit some of that same energy in the form of visible blue light.So in simple words it means that the quinine is simply absorbing the UV light, that's outside of the visible spectrum, and converting it to light we can see.
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