While the mechanism of light generation is not exactly clear, current thought on the matter is that when a hard crystalline material is broken into pieces (upon mechanical fracture), charge is separated momentarily in the material and light is produced upon discharge, or recombination, of the separated charges. Several minerals exhibit this property, fluorite ( chemically this mineral is calcium fluoride) being one. That is to say, some substances become luminous when scratched, crushed, or rubbed. What you see when you bite into a Cert in the dark is a manifestation of what is called " triboluminescence" - the mechanical generation of light. Have your assistant eat a Cert or two so you can see the magical blue spark too. If your assistant didn't see the spark, try again. If you did everything right, you should be able to see a faint blue spark when the Cert breaks up between your teeth. Place a Cert in your mouth and bite down on it with your mouth open so your assistant can see.Wait for your eyes to adjust to the dark.Usually, a person looks in a mirror or peers into a partner's mouth while crunching the candy to see the resulting blue sparks. The idea is to break the hard, donut-shaped candy in the dark. Go to a completely dark place, like a closet at night with your assistant For several decades people have been playing in the dark with triboluminescence using wintergreen-flavored Lifesavers candy.
Buy some regular Certs or Wint-O-Green Lifesavers.So next time you’re focused on freshening your breath with a wintergreen treat, find a dark space and a mirror and let the lightning fly.Have you ever tried this? If not, it is a very illuminating scientific experiment you can do at home. Wintergreen oil (or, in the case of the ones I just tried staring into the bathroom mirror in the dark, “artificial flavor”) will absorb the energy from the ultraviolet light and then emit blue light. What bumps certain sweet suckers into the world of blue, visible lightning is their flavoring. The lifesavers should make bright sparks in everyones mouths. But we humans can’t see ultraviolet light. Humans are not physically adapted for life in the total dark. So far, all of this could happen with many hard, sugary candies. The nitrogen briefly absorbs the energy from the collision and then spits out some energy - in the form of ultraviolet light. In your mouth, these jumping electrons crash into nitrogen atoms, which is abundant in the air. (Recent research suggests that the sparks’ energy is powerful enough to trigger chemical reactions such as combustion.) “There is a little bolt of lightning that shoots between the faces,” says Arnold Rheingold, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego who has studied triboluminescence.
The electrons leap across the gap to the more positively charged side. When you break a sugar crystal, one half of the crystal ends up with more electrons than the other. But crystals that don’t have this symmetry or are impure often do. Think: salt or diamond) Scientists believe that the structure of a crystal determines whether or not it will emit light when broken, a phenomenon dubbed triboluminescence.Ĭrystals in which every unit is symmetrically arranged around a center point don’t tend to have this feature. We don’t have to go into wavelengths and all that, but basically the wintergreen oil absorbs the ultraviolet (invisible) light and takes it over, emitting sparks of visible blue light. (Chemists define a solid crystal as a substance where each unit of matter repeats with a regular pattern. The Wint-O-Green lifesaver creates a bright flash because the flavoring, methyl salicylate (a.k.a. So what causes the cool light show? When you crunch down on a candy, you shatter its sugar crystals. Four tweens in their bunk beds have now independently confirmed what two minutes ago was just a rumor to us: Wint-O-Green Life Savers spark in the dark. It’s a hot night in the Adirondack mountains, crickets are playing their evening sonata and I’m watching cool-blue sparks in the dark. Turn up your sound and click on the VIDEO above to see a lifesaver sparking away. Is it true I can create ball lightning in my microwave oven? Eric R.