Remember playing with Silly Putty as a kid? That oddly flesh colored compound that came in a plastic egg that you could mold into different shapes and use to pull images from the comics page up and other pointless activities like that? Remember how one of the coolest things about Silly Putty was that it was soft and pliant, but if you hit it with a hammer it would shatter?
Remember all of that?
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you got a lot of Silly Putty and made a big ball out of it and dropped it off of, say, a building? Bet that would be pretty cool, don’t you? Did you know that you can order this stuff by the pound from Dow Corning? I didn’t either, but someone else did and they got a hold of 50 pounds of this crap and decided to find out just what would happen if they dropped it off of a building.
I wonder how much that cost to do? After all it’s important to replicate experiments repeatedly to verify… uh… the data.. yeah. That’s the ticket!
Posted on 01/18/2004 at 12:43 AM 
Posted on 01/18/2004 at 12:50 AM 
Here’s another science experiment that you may like. It’s along the same “liquid that shatters” line.
Take about half a cup of corn starch.
Drip water into it while stirring. You’re trying to get it all wet. At some point it’ll be about the consistency of heavy cream but for some reason it’ll be really hard to stir. That’s what you’re going for.
You’re now ready. If you put this liquid under pressure, it turns into a solid. As soon as you stop adding pressure, it turns back into a liquid.
Add a little more corn starch if you don’t get this effect. You made it too runny.
You can roll it into a ball in your hands. When you stop rolling, it will pour out from between your fingers. Tres cool.