Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

My school does an unusual kind of science fair where we're doing our project lots of times, quickly, for different groups of people. Since I don't have 10 minutes to let the salt water and fresh water mix, would using smaller bottles work? I'm hoping it wouldn't change the results, and could decrease the amount of time I'm using up.

Hi there and welcome to Science Buddies!
It sounds like you have a really cool project, and we're going to do our best to help you out. I just read the project guide for the "Can Water Float on Water" experiment, and it looks like your suggestion of using smaller bottles might help you. The part that includes that you need to take observations for 10 minutes doesn't necessarily mean that it'll take 10 minutes for the contents to mix, it just means that you should be writing down observations for that length of time. To demonstrate the project to groups of people in a short amount of time, just disregard the 10 minute mark and show them that they won't mix. If you wanted to, you could also have a large model of the flipped bottles on display, so when you're done flipping the mini-bottles for the group, you can point to your larger model that will have been already flipped since the beginning of your science fair evening and say that that is an example of the solution when it's been left for longer than 10 mins, etc...

Does that make sense? Hope that helps!
Happy bottle flipping! If we can help you with anything else please don't hesitate to reach out.

Stay nerdy,
lmp1341

Those are good ideas! Thanks!

Thank you for the detailed answer. I was also searching for this project.