Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Snot Slower
Does an object's speed through a fluid depend on its viscosity? According to this article, apparently not. At least when the object is human-sized. Experimenters dumped 300 kilos of guar gum, a thickening agent, into a 25-meter swimming pool, creating a liquid twice as thick as water that "looked like snot". Timed results of swimming in this liquid vs. regular water differed by no more than 4%. The article doesn't indicate how they managed to coax their 16 volunteer swimmers to do laps in a pool of filled with a "snot like" liquid. 
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