Remember Mikey from the Life commercials? It’s ok if you don’t. To be honest, I don’t either, nor, to Susan’s dismay, do I remember The Facts of Life, Different Strokes, or Laverne & Shirley. As I stared at Susan blankly while she sang me these unfamiliar theme songs, she exclaimed “ya know what’s wrong with your generation? Your sitcoms didn’t have theme songs.”
Psh, well at least my generation never believed that eating Pop Rocks and drinking soda made some cereal commercial kid’s stomach explode! My generation is far too skeptical to believe such absurd rumors. Besides, we’ve always had the internet to dispel urban legends with real hard scientific facts.
The candy science of Pop Rocks is surprisingly simple. They are made almost the same way as typical hard candy. The only difference is that prior to the cooling step, the hot liquid sugar is carbonated with tiny little bubbles of carbon dioxide. When the sugar solution hardens into candy, the CO2 bubbles become trapped in the solid candy matrix. Soda is carbonated the same way, except that it remains a liquid.
We should really get Carl to help us with the math, but the total amount of CO2 will be equal to the sum of the CO2 in the soda and the CO2 in the Pop Rocks. No extra CO2 or other potentially explosive gases are produced by this combination, thus no explosion ensues.
Don’t believe me? Try this rockin’ experiment yourself. Pour one packet of Pop Rocks into a balloon. Slowly enclose the balloon over the opening of a small Coke bottle. Let the contents of the balloon fall into the coke bottle and see what happens. In the theoretically unlikely event that the balloon pops, please report back here to discuss your results.
Pop Rocks by inajeep.
11:29 am on January 13th, 2010
I am going to try this experiment, Laura. And I stand by my claim that growing up on sitcoms without theme songs is weird and wrong.