Magnetic Cereal?
I dont really know what else to call it but that. Ya know when your eating a bowl of cereal and you get down to the last bit of cereal left. Enough were its no longer piled on top of each other, but each piece freely floating around in the milk. Why does cereal attract to other pieces and then stick once they come close enough. It looks like theyre little magnets. Is this due to the high iron levels in the cereal?
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Perhaps you should visit the doctors, because you’ve been eating metal cereal!
No, it’s mostly due to surface tension. Okay, so this will take a little while, but here we go.
So, the reason a liquid stays together, and doesn’t disperse into a gas, is because of the attraction between the molecules in the milk is higher then the forces trying to split it apart. So, knowing that, let’s add the cereal.
So, the interactions between the milk and the cereal are different. Since the cereal is different then the milk, it interacts differently. In this case, the milk doesn’t want to interact with the cereal, so to speak. The attraction between the milk and the cereal is higher then the interaction between the milk and the cereal.
So, it can be said that the milk-cereal interaction is ‘higher energy’. Nature wants to reduce energy in a system, and so the milk and cereal move in such a way so that the cereal ‘sticks’ together. This means the amount of milk that interacts with the cereal is smaller (since now the cereal interacts with itself on several sides).
So, no, it has very little to do with iron content, and much more to do with the general chemistry of the system. Hope that helps!
Holy mother of God. I was just reading an article on this yesterday. Get out of my head, Uberbatman.
It is called the Cheerios Effect. This is a link to an article from the American Journal of Physics. Pretty cool.
I like reading fun questions and answers like this from really smart people!
I was going to explain the surface tension bit, but @BhacSsylan beat me to it. I do like the term “Cheerios Effect” though. Thanks for the link, @Les.
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