water pressure

Experiment One The best thing about this is, it’s got people in it, so it immediately places you in the classroom with the kids. Darren (Darren Ridley) and Tracy (Tracy Bastow - the older sister of Jason, who became a good friend of mine later on) were both in the third year, so could obviously be trusted to hold steadily-heavying bowls of water without dropping and/or smashing them all on the classroom floor. This story was buried at the bottom of a carrier bag for nearly three decades before I rediscovered it in 2007, so any memory I have of it should have been obliterated by time. But reading it now, I can still see their smiling faces as they try to catch the water in the bowls, and I can still hear our giggles as we watch them struggling not to drop what they’re holding. Whether those memories are real or imagined, I’ll never know, but Tracy’s bowl is a large, beige ceramic one we usually used for mixing the butter and sugar to stick on the top of fairy buns. And since I didn’t start making buns at school until at least age 11, I’d say this memory is almost 100% completely made up. Not sure I’ve written this up in the most effective way, but the picture tells me everything I need to know. Basically, the more water there is above the hole, the more pressure upon the water below, so water will gush out of a hole at the bottom much more forcefully than it would near the top, where there’s much less pressure. It’s a cool little experiment and must have been fun as well as eye-opening. I only wish we’d carried on doing more experiments like this into high school age, then I might have found Physics slightly more interesting. (It wasn’t one of my best subjects.) Note the upside-down ‘Thursday’ at the bottom of the page, where I clearly misunderstood the direction to start writing at the back of the book. We were discouraged from crossing out or erasing mistakes, leaving stuff like this for posterity,

Thursday October 18th, 1979

Water Pressure