Do You Know Why a Can of Diet Coke Floats While a Can of Regular Coke Sinks?

Marker 1000. asks: Cans of Diet Coke float. Cans of regular Coke don't.  The cans are the same size and they comprise the same amount of liquid according to the characterization. What gives?

Fun fact: If you lot put a can of Coca-Cola into a pool of water, information technology would sink. Withal, if y'all put a can of Diet Coke into the same pool, it would float. (Another fun fact: Coca-Cola was invented by a homo seeking a cure for the morphine addiction he acquired during the Civil State of war, and he marketed Coca-Cola as that.)

In any outcome, initially, this floating trouble seems like something that breaks physics because both cans are the exact same size and contain exactly the aforementioned amount of liquid.  Of course, anyone who's ever taken a physics grade at some signal probably knows what makes a given object bladder in the offset place, in the simplest possible sense, is that an object will bladder provided information technology displaces an amount of liquid (or sufficiently dense gas) that weighs more itself.

Every bit y'all may call up, 1 of the primeval known scientific uses of density was by the ancient Greek mathematician and all round nerd, Archimedes when the king of Syracuse supposedly asked him to determine whether or not his crown was made from the same bar of pure gold he'd originally given his jeweler. The king suspected that the jeweler had pocketed some of the gold he'd been given, replacing it with silvery, only couldn't prove it without melting downwards his crown and physically comparing information technology to another block of golden the same size every bit the original, which wasn't an selection the rex was going to consider.

Eventually, Archimedes hatched a cunning plan to submerse the crown and mensurate the amount of water it displaced and compare that to the corporeality of water displaced by an equal mass of pure gold. If the crown had been fabricated with less dense materials than pure gold (including silvery), it would readapt more than h2o than the gold bar. Legend has it that Archimedes happened upon this idea when he jumped into a bath total of water and sent waves of bathroom h2o cascading to the flooring, resulting in him running naked through the streets screaming Eureka! (Greek for "I found it").

Sadly, but not mayhap surprising, both Archimedes' eureka moment and the whole idea of him submerging the crown in h2o are believed to be the work of fiction, attributed to noted Roman scholar, Vitruvius, a full 2 centuries after Archimedes died. Further, it'southward believed that just submerging the crown in water wouldn't have given precise enough measurements for Archimedes to make a judgment on whether or non the crown contained a lilliputian silver (at least not with the tools he had available). But it makes a great anecdote for high school science teachers to tell their students I guess. (Another common one told past many a math teacher/professor is that the reason there is no Nobel Prize for mathematics is because a famed mathematician stole Alfred Nobel's daughter.  Unfortunately, this is non true at all either. See: The Reason At that place is No Nobel Prize in Mathematics)

In whatever event, regardless of the veracity of such tales, Archimedes' name ultimately would forever exist linked with the idea of density and buoyancy subsequently he wrote the post-obit in his landmark piece, On Floating Bodies: "If a solid lighter than a fluid is forcibly immersed in it, the solid will exist driven upwards by a forcefulness equal to the difference between its weight and the weight of the fluid displaced."

Today this idea is, of course, known as Archimedes' Principle.

So getting dorsum to cans of floating fizzy drinks- nosotros know from all this that given a tin of Diet Coke floats and a regular can of Coke sinks, despite the pair containing the same amount of liquid and in the same model of can, the regular Coke's combined ingredients must be more dense. And, in fact, a 12 ounce can of Coke has more mass because of the 39 grams of sugar it contains, compared to the 125 milligrams of sweetener in a tin can of Diet Coke.  This minute difference in density between both cans but so happens to result in the total mass of either tin can falling on either side of the average density of pure water (just slightly less than 1 yard/cc, varying slightly based on temperature, reaching its maximum density at iv degrees Celsius or 39.two degrees Fahrenheit). This results in one tin floating and the other sinking and science teachers everywhere having a trick to continue with their often questionably accurate anecdotes. 😉

If you liked this commodity, you might also enjoy our new pop podcast, The BrainFood Evidence (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), besides as:

• What Happens When Yous Freeze Water in a Container And then Potent the H2o Can't Aggrandize Into Ice?
• Why are Some Ice Cubes Articulate and Others Cloudy?
• Why Do Mentos and Diet Coke React?
• Why Coke Tried to Switch to "New Coke"
• The Truth Nearly Aspartame and Your Health

Bonus Facts:

• One of the mutual early uses of Bayer'southward drug Heroin (aye, the Aspirin people) was to help treat people who were addicted to morphine, even though Heroin ultimately proved to be more addictive.  Humorously (or not, depending on your perspective), when morphine was first isolated from opium in 1805, one of its early uses was as a "non-addictive" drug to treat people who were fond to opium.  You tin read more on this hither: When Bayer Marketed Heroin as a Non-Addictive Cough Medicine
• A better method Archimedes could have used (which wouldn't have required farthermost precision) to solve the supposed crown problem was later suggested past Galileo Galilei, namely compare the dry weight with the wet weight.  More than specifically, offset residuum the crown and the lump of gold on a scale in air.  Next, practise the same, only when submersed in water.  If they don't residual the same, one contains something the other doesn't.
• Another common science classroom anecdote is that Newton had an apple fall on his head, which inspired his so-called "eureka" moment on how gravity worked.  Surprisingly enough, this one has some truth to it. See: Did Newton Actually Have an Apple Fall on His Head

Expand for Further References

taylorrectee.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/09/diet-coke-float-regular-coke-doesnt/

Share this post