It’s Valentine’s Day and here at the Chemistry World cabana, we want to make sure our readers have the best one yet. No doubt many of you will be spending the evening with a special someone and to make sure the conversation flows, you may share a glass or two of that most romantic of tipples – champagne. And what better accompaniment could there be to such a perfect evening than some champagne science trivia? Clearly none.

Now, as a veteran of a date, with a girl, I can say with some authority that nothing relieves the paralysing tension and awkwardness of a first date (or for that matter the wearisome banality and contemptuous familiarity of the umpteenth) like some well-selected items of trivia. No; nothing. It’s easy: if you haven’t got anything interesting to say, a useless fact or two is sure to give you a highbrow mien. Using nothing more than the rudiments of reading, you can borrow intelligence and assume intellect through the passive regurgitation of words and phrases. Just like Vernon Kay.

And, of course, science trivia is the best of all.

So to it. We’ll be using Gerard Liger-Belair’s paper published today in the European Physical Journal ST, but you’re welcome to choose your own. Liger-Belair has compiled close to 100 pages on the topic of champagne bubbles (this is very nearly trivia in itself) and we’ve summarised some of the best bits below.

As a starter, last week, Patrick took us through Liger-Belair’s work on the appropriate champagne glassware and so you may wish to begin your trivia torrent with the myth of the coupe’s mammarian mimicry. Though men should be aware that this is a somewhat high-tariff manoeuvre and must be executed whilst maintaining constant eye-contact (assuming a typical finite simple group of order two enjoying gender dichotomy).

Thankfully, Liger-Belair’s bubble work provides plenty of safer option for the less adventurous trivia buff. Bubbles not only lend champagne an effervescent sparkle, they are also critical to the flavour and experience. As they rise, champagne bubbles carry volatile organic compounds to the liquid’s surface, and drag surfactant molecules along as they go. When they reach the surface and burst, they create a concentrated aerosol of sensory molecules, known as the ‘nose’. And once in the mouth, the bubbles continue to form and collapse and the CO₂ they release provides carbonic acid to excite nociceptors (involved in sensing pain), both of which contribute to champagne’s mouthfeel (a somewhat discomfiting compound word, though consider if you will handsmell, or eyeflavour and offer a prayer of thanks for their continued absence from the lexicon).

Your average 750ml bottle of champagne contains around 9g (5l) of dissolved CO₂, which roughly equates to some 10⁸ bubbles. Anyone who has held a glass of champagne will know that the bubbles rise in graceful columns from specific sites within the liquid. What you may not know is that these nucleation sites are not scratches or defects of the glass but are typically cellulose fibres adhering to the walls of the glass, deposited from the air or the cloth used to dry it. The gas bubbles already trapped within these fibres provide the perfect place for gaseous CO₂ to form. These cellulose fibres will occasionally detach from the glass wall and journey through the liquid, creating the trains of bubbles suspended within the liquid, charmingly referred to as ‘fliers’.

Liger-Belair also obtained some quite beautiful high-speed shots of bubbles forming and collapsing at the surface of champagne. So following these nuggets you may wish to use the hexagonal symmetry of the bubbled surface to lead into a discourse on tessellation with particular reference to examples from the natural world. Alternatively, the collapsing bubble and its ensuing jet of liquid provide ample opportunity to venture into fluid physics. In my experience, your dating partner will be so overawed at this display of information that they will say little to nothing for the remainder of the evening, leaving you free to talk at length.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

                  

Source:
http://prospect.rsc.org/blogs/cw/?feed=rss2