Mad Science

The Mad Scientist at the Smithson House decided to do a crazy experiment today. The experiment involved red cabbage juice. A little factual background: Red Cabbage is a natural pH indicator. It will change colors when it come into contact with acid or a base. Don't believe me... then check it out!

Above is one of my mad scientist waiting for the action. Below are 6 cups of red cabbage, also waiting for action. Here they are checking it out while we decide what to put into the cups first.

Naturally, we decided on vinegar and baking soda. We use them in all our other experiments, why not this one? We started with the vinegar. What happens when you pour a clear liquid into a purple one? It turns hot pink! of course!

Noelle says she wants one to turn blue. Well... add the baking soda to a fresh cup of the indicator juice, and guess what you get... Blue!

Now let's get creative... how about adding other things? Like soda?

Or laundry detergent?

We all got in on the action.

From left to right you have: Vinegar, Juice from a fresh orange, Sprite, Laundry Detergent, Baking Soda, and a cup of Red Cabbage Juice with nothing added. If you can tell, if the pH is acidic, the indicator will turn a shade of pink (the shade depends on the acidity). If it is basic, the indicator will turn blue/green (the shade depends on the pH). Cool, right?

Then we got really crazy and decided to see if we could get the pH back to neutral (or in Laman's terms, we wanted the solution to be purple again.) We added vinegar (an acid) to the basic solutions. Instant volcanic action! The detergent never returned to purple, but the baking soda did.

Then we added ant-acids to the acidic mixtures (starting with the vinegar)

Cool, right?

I did a similar experiment with my Grandma George when I was a little girl. I always remembered it. We didn't try to get the solutions purple again, but we did check out the color changes that occur with acids and bases. Anyhow, we had fun. If anyone wants to know how to make the red cabbage juice, just email me. :)