Cornfingers
This exhibit is a demonstration of a very strange phenomenon using cornstarch and water.
This page describes the experiments with fluid mixtures of cornstarch and water, or glass balls and water. A petri-dish of cornstarch and water is vibrated until specific frequencies and accelerations are experienced by the mixture.
It then begins to behave very strangely. No I mean REALLY strangely. There is a video on the experiments page. If you watch the video, (VLC player recommended) stick right through until the end for the big hitting finale.
Basically we want to recreate this curiosity, so that the proud burghers of Ipswich can experience this bizarre phenomenon for themselves, face to face.
At present, we speculate that a signal generator plus an amplifier and big speaker drive units might be able to recreate the experimental conditions. We’ll also have to prevent the water from evaporating somehow if it’s going to run for more than a few minutes, in order to maintain the proper consistency.
(Maybe we should experiment with using liquids other than water - something that does not evaporate readily… Perhaps some type of thin oil? Any physicists or chemists have any knowledge of this area? Also there is the question of the longevity of a cornstarch/water mixture - surely this will be rapidly colonised by moulds? Perhaps this is a follow-on experiment: what happens to a mixture of cornstarch and water when it is left alone for several weeks?)
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