Did you like the experiment? Now we are going to tell you more about this exciting drink
“A bottle of Bollinger and Beluga, please.” If a waiter in a luxury hotel hears these words, there is no doubt that the person asking is James Bond … or a copycat. Both the famous champagne like the no less famous caviar they symbolize luxury and the good life.
The usual sparkling drink of the celebrationsacquires its bubbles due to a second fermentation of the wine in the bottle to achieve carbonation, that is, that the carbon dioxide ends up dissolving in the liquid element. This fermentation is caused by the so-called expedition liquid, characteristic of each winery and which contains a certain amount of sugars, or without it, as is the case of thebrut nature.
The gas remains dissolved in the champagne until it is opened due to the callhenry’s law, which says that the solubility of gases increases with increasing pressure that the same gas exerts on the liquid if we keep the temperature constant. Thus, in the neck of the bottle, the carbon dioxide can exert a pressure of 30 atmospheres, which forces the gas to return to the champagne as soon as it leaves it. Butwhen the bottle is openedwith the characteristic¡pop!thatgas comes out, the pressure is equalized to atmospheric and thecarbon dioxideforced to remain dissolved it can come out of the liquid, forming the classic bubbles.
But for these to form we need nucleation points in the form of dust particles, irregularities inside the champagne glass … that promote the formation of bubbles. And this is what happens when we pour a little ash, sugar or salt into our already calmed glass. We add new nucleation points causing a new gas release.
If we want to avoid forming that classic string of bubbles that appears in our glass once “calmed down”, what we have to do is “file” the surface of the glass.How? Smearing it withoil. If we do it like this, as in the experiment, we will see that the production of bubbles in our glass – which we have already allowed to calm down after serving the liquid gold – is practically non-existent.
Champagne and scientific method
How could it be otherwise, pseudoscience could not walk away from this drink. Who hasn’t heard about the spoon? This urban legend comes in handy to explain what the scientific method is.
The way we understand how the world works is called the hypothetical-deductive method . In essence, it consists of formulating explanatory hypotheses about a certain phenomenon and checking its validity through controlled experiments. In our case, the starting hypothesis is that putting a teaspoon on the neck of an open champagne bottle prevents it from losing gas (in Aragon this fact is called with a most picturesque word, sneak). To verify this, we propose the following experiment: we open two bottles of champagne and one place the spoon on it while the other, the control bottle, we just leave it open. After two weeks we compared the result with another recently opened. The conclusion is obvious …
That simple and that direct. If we apply this method to seers, astrologers, healers and other “sensitive” they would soon be out of business. Of course, what remains is the most difficult: accepting the conclusions of the experiment despite our own expectations.
