Experiemental Designs and Conclusions -- 1-20-11

Reflect on the expansion of water and salt water experiments you and your classmates performed. What are some of the interesting results and struggles with this experiment.

The information that Brandy shared in class was interesting. She attempted to measure how much the water expanded and found that the salt water expanded 3.0, 3.4 and 3.3 after every hour she checked. When I did my experiement, the plain water definetly expanded and my way to measure that was to put a line on the cup when I first put the water in and then another line once it was frozen and it was clearly visible that the water had expanded. I then took a ruler to see how much it expanded and I found out 1/2 centimeters. To be honest I never thought about the fact that a cup is different size as it goes up and that just measuring it wouldn't be sufficient, but this is what I did nevertheless. For the salt water though I checked on the water before it was frozen and it literally shrunk. There was not as much water in the glass and when I measured it I found that there was a little less than 1/2 centimter of water that disappeared. So in my experiement the salt water decreased, not increased like Brandy's. And even if my measuring was off, it was clearly visible that some of the water had dissapeared.

Relate your thoughts on this experiment to the scientific question "Is the earth warming?"

 

I think even if the earth is warming we cannot feel the differences now and maybe if the earth keeps on warming like people think it is then we will feel a difference. The certain gases in the atmosphere that scientists believe are warming the earth we cannot capture or stop them from warming the earth. But my opinion is no, I do not believe the earth is warming up. Personally, I think scientists just say it to scare us to make drastic differences in the way we live. I do believe the earth is going downhill pretty fast and that's because of the decisions we all make everyday, and I'm sure in the future nothing good is going to come out of that, but for right now my answer is no I do not believe this. I think it's a possiblity but there's so many questions I have that goes along with it. How do scientists capture the earth to see if it's really warming? I like evidence so I would like some before I am convinced. :)