Feb 28, 2023
The puzzler this week came from my dear brother, Tom.
This one was about ginger ale. And this one requires a bit of storytelling. So, here it is.
When you buy a bottle of ginger ale, after a little while it loses its fizz, right? So my brother conducted an experiment. He thought that if you leave a bottle out of the refrigerator with the cover off, it would go flat, right? So, he went to the store and got two big identical bottles of ginger ale. He got home and labeled them with a marker, A and B.
Then he instructed his whole family on the rules of the experiment. He put a data sheet on the counter. Any time they got a bottle out of the refrigerator, they had to record the precise time they got the bottle out of the refrigerator, which bottle it was, when they took the cap off, when they put the cap back on, and when they put the bottle back in the refrigerator.
At the end of two days, he decided it was time to take a look at the experiment. He opened the refrigerator door and there were the two bottles of ginger ale. One of the bottles of ginger ale had no fizz at all. It was flat. Completely unfizzy. However, the other bottle was just as fizzy as the day he brought it home. All fizzy, all day.
So, he took a look at the data. Both bottles of ginger ale were half full at that point. When he looked at the data sheet, he discovered that both bottles had been out of the refrigerator exactly the same amount of time. When he added up all the times, they came out to be exactly the same. The amount of time that the caps were off the bottles came out to be exactly the same.
So, knowing that is the data from the experiment, how come one of the bottles is flat and the other bottle remained fizzy?
Good luck.
Answer time, my friends. This is sort of an automotive puzzler because it is about CAR-bonation. Get it? Carbonation in ginger ale? Car?
Okay, I'll stop.
Here it is. Two identical bottles of ginger ale. I had my family write down every time they took them out of the fridge, when the caps were off, and when they went back in. I was hoping to show them that the bottle that had been out of the refrigerator and with the cap off the longest would be flat. And the other one indeed would be fizzy.
At the end of the test, both bottles were half full. The data showed they were out of the fridge for almost the exact same amount of time, and the caps had been off for the same amount of time. So I expected that the bottles would be the same in terms of carbonation, the fizziness. But much to my surprise, one bottle was flat as a pancake, and the other one was as fizzy as the day I brought it home. So, what happened?
Here is the answer. Yes, it does matter how long the bottle is out of the refrigerator. And yes, it does matter how long the cap is off. But what matters more is when you take the cap off. Why? Because as we all know, solids dissolve in warm things better than cold things but gases dissolve in cold things better than warm things. So, when I looked at the times the caps were off the bottles, it was the same. But when I looked at when the caps were off, that was the difference.
Here's what happened to the one that was flat. They would take the bottle out of the refrigerator, then leave the cap on. It warms up to room temperature. At this time, all the fizz gets ready to escape. The fizz is currently in the bottle, trapped. You take the cover off and it all escapes into the atmosphere.
Good one!
