Oh, hey, hi! I am Crazy Chris and welcome to So Cool Science -- science you can do right at home. I am just out here freezing and going over today’s science file. And today’s science file says, “Why can you see your breath?” Well, that’s an excellent question. Try this.
You will need a pop bottle and your home freezer. Get yourself a pop bottle and make sure that it’s fully empty. You’re going to take this pop bottle and fill it with hot, hot bottle. Hot, be careful! When you’re finished, dump the water out and screw on the cap. Make sure that you can see that there is no water in the bottle.
Now take this bottle and place it in your freezer for one minute. Ok, that was exactly one minute. Now take the bottle out of your freezer. And look, you can see water in the bottle. Whoa, now that is so cool. Ok, now leave this bottle in your freezer for 30 to 40 minutes. Who-hoo! That’s just enough time for me to play my favorite video game. Hoo! Haha!
Ok, to keep the show moving, you can see ice in the bottle now. There’s ice in there. That is so cool. Now we went from a bottle that looked like it had no water in it, to having water in it and then, having ice. So what’s going on here? Well, take a closer look at this.
When you dump all the water and screw on the cap, there’s water vapor, which is the gas phase of water, in the bottle. When you place the bottle in the freezer, the freezer took away energy from the gas molecules slowing them down and bringing them together to form a liquid. If you continue to leave the bottle in the freezer, energy will continue to be taken away from the water, slowing the water molecules down, even further till they form a solid. This is the same thing that happens when you see your breath. As the warm water vapor leaves your lungs, the cold air takes away energy and turns your breath into a cloud that you can see and then into tiny ice droplets.
So now you know that you can turn a gas into a liquid and then turn a liquid into a solid. You know, turning water into ice, ah, so you could put it in your coco and not burn your mouth again. Here’s why science is so cool.
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