In a cup full of water, you can also add two other cups of the same volume filled with sugar. If you don’t believe it, take the test. Although it is difficult to believe that so much sugar will fit in a container that is already occupied, this fact is not a matter of magic, but is explained through science.
And it has to do with the way sugar dissolves in water. Sugar is a substance formed by a compound that forms covalent bonds , that is, bonds formed by elements such as oxygen and hydrogen, which are non-metals. Water (whose molecules are made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom), too.
Between both substances there are the well-known hydrogen bonds , which take place when there are attractive forces between a hydrogen atom of a molecule and a highly electronegative atom (such as oxygen) of another molecule.
Due to this specificity, the solution composed of water and sugar allows this to take place when there is only one molecule of sugar for every twelve molecules of water . In other words, in a cup of sugar there is only one twenty-fifth of the number of molecules present in a cup of water.
And it is that a glass full of sugar, the gaps between the granites are filled with air , making it occupy a larger volume, with all that space full of wasted air. But when introducing the sugar in water, the particles are placed using the space much better, making it fit twice the volume of sugar.
This mixture between sugar and water is a heterogeneous solution , that is, once the mixture is made, we cannot distinguish the water from the sugar and we cannot remove the sugar grains from the water again. In it, sugar is the “solute” and water is the “solvent .” The attractive forces between the sugar and water particles are so strong that the sugar particles eventually separate and mix with the water particles, causing them to be completely mixed together in an irreversible way.
