In last post Ino left the following comment:
“The yolk does sink if the egg is raw, if you shake it enough to break the membranes. Using that idea, you can balance a raw egg on its bottom, which looks quite cool, but requires a really flat, still table to do it on.”
I tried to do this, but I wasn’t skilled enough to achieve it. However, it got me thinking if it was really perhaps the membrane somehow pushing the egg yolks up, so I did the following experiment. I put a single egg yolk in a glass and then poured over it 3 egg whites. This was the result:
Egg yolk floating in egg whites.
As you can see the egg yolk seems to always float, membranes or no membranes. I think that the obstacle for keeping an egg vertically still on a table (other than the curved surface) is then the air bubble it has at the bottom:
Air bubble in a row egg.
For a better picture of the anatomy of an egg click here. I tried shaking an egg until I could hear the yolk was loose but I still wasn’t able to keep the egg vertically still. When I cracked it open the air bubble was indeed broken, but I can’t be sure that that happened during the shaking . If you manage to balance an egg on its bottom it’d be great if you could take a picture of it and send it to us.
14/06/2009 at 12:54
That’s quite interesting, I really did think it would sink. But I suppose your experiment proves otherwise. I wasn’t aware of the air bubble, so that might have something to do with it.
I have managed to balance it before, but I really can’t remember if I took pictures. It stayed like that on the table for several hours (until the next morning) and then I decided someone might push the table and we would end up with raw egg on the carpet. But maybe it’s time for another go!
17/06/2009 at 11:56
[...] Floating yolks follow up [...]