Peanut Butter Science
One of my friends forwarded me a video she found online, which I am sure many of you have also seen. It involved taking a piece of coal, heating it up, and then covering it in peanut butter before freezing the entire mixture for a few days. Apparently if you then scrape away the peanut butter, carefully, you can create a crystal that looks like a diamond.
“Is this true?” she wanted to know. “And if so, how does it work?”
It turns out that it is pretty easy to test this experiment, and so we did it one day in the fall. First of all, it is nowhere near as easy to get peanut butter to stick to hot coal as they make it seem in the video. Second of all, it definitely does not work as well as the videos seem to suggest. What we got is some kind of small ice crystals, but when we tried to use warm water to get the peanut butter off, it all melted.
The “scientific explanation” for this online is that the peanut butter has carbon dioxide that turns into diamond. This is entirely untrue. Heating the coal can localize the water, and freezing the hot coal can then freeze the centralized water into ice. That is about all the science that is involved here.
Unfortunately for us, we wasted some perfectly good peanut butter debunking this myth, so this way you do not have to try it out for yourselves.
For more information, check out the link below:
