Hey guys,
Almost time to got to work, but just wanted to give a quick reply. Appreciate the time you have put into this. One thing I can do, is definitely not mention that half of the bottles are controls. I can just say that some of the bottles are controls but not give any other indication. I think this adds to the "rigorousness" of the test. That way he won't be mentally calculating which 5 must be "right" and which 5 must be "wrong".
That's a good idea.
I didn't calculate the weight of the sphere yet, but it is 10mm in size and threaded on the siphon tube in the bottle. It can't go anywhere. I found out my bottles are about 73% silica. But I need to use glass for the Quartz water. So I will have to go with it. Plastic has its own issues. I don't think the glass will be an issue either, as you say it has a very different structure. I will enclose all bottles entirely except for the spray top, I may even make secret markings to be able to tell if someone else got curious and opened them. I will do a weight test with my girlfriend, if she guesses too much of the time which are which, I will add some weight to the controls. Please be patient, this could take a month or longer to complete. Have a great day!
By my calculations here, a solid quartz sphere of 1 cm in diameter has a volume of 0.52 cm3, and will weigh 1.38 grams (since the density of quartz is 2.65 gram per cm3). The same spherical 0.52 cm3 volume of water will weight 0.52 grams (since the density of water is 1 gram per cm3).
So this means the quartz bottles will only weight just under 1 gram more that the control bottles. This is never going to be noticeable.
Though if you want the bottles to weigh exactly the same, you could just add an extra 1 ml of water into the control bottles (1 ml of water = 1 gram). 1 ml is very small amount, since a teaspoon holds 5 ml.
We also appreciate the effort you are putting in to doing a very good job of testing, Orangeray.
Looking forward to seeing your results.
I do hope you are enjoying this. It should be an interesting exercise. I certainly am quite excited by it.
Edited by Hip, 21 January 2012 - 12:29 AM.