We were talking about ear wax, and he asked “what is wax?” I gave him examples like candles and beeswax, but he hasn’t really observed enough of those things for the examples to help.
In: Engineering
Wax is really interesting! It’s made of all the same things that oil and plastic are made of, and the way it behaves is somewhere in between them. Oil, wax, and plastic are all made up of molecules that are kind of like chains. The links are all the same, but the longer the chains are, the more likely they are to tangle up. That tangling is what holds plastic and wax together when they’re cool, and when you heat them up, that loosens the tangles and lets the molecules move around (softening and melting!). You can demonstrate this with Legos or other building toys. Oil is like if you have a pile of loose bricks. It doesn’t take much effort to pour them, push your hand through, etc. Plastic is more like having all the bricks stuck together. It takes a lot of force to change the shape of the single interconnected block. Wax is like sticking together small clumps of Legos, then loosely piling the clumps up. It has more structure than the pile of loose bricks, but not as much as the single block.
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