Some questions can be answered in your living room, if you’re willing to do the work. Neil Fraser was willing to put in the time and effort to find out if a Lava Lamp would continue to work in a high-gravity environment such as Jupiter.

Would the wax still rise to the surface? Would the blobs be smaller and faster?

Fraser has this to say about his experiment:

The centrifuge is a genuinely terrifying device. The lights dim when it is switched on. A strong wind is produced as the centrifuge induces a cyclone in the room. The smell of boiling insulation emanates from the overloaded 25 amp cables. If not perfectly adjusted and lubricated, it will shred the teeth off solid brass gears in under a second. Runs were conducted from the relative safety of the next room while peeking through a crack in the door.

Did the Lava Lamp work? At 3x Earth’s gravity, it still would be fun to watch under certain altered states. Whether the substances leading to those states would also work under Jupiter’s gravity was not tested, apparently.

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Kent Anderson

Kent Anderson

Kent Anderson is the CEO of RedLink and RedLink Network, a past-President of SSP, and the founder of the Scholarly Kitchen. He has worked as Publisher at AAAS/Science, CEO/Publisher of JBJS, Inc., a publishing executive at the Massachusetts Medical Society, Publishing Director of the New England Journal of Medicine, and Director of Medical Journals at the American Academy of Pediatrics. Opinions on social media or blogs are his own.

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