This week's experiment should be familiar to any of you that have ever cooked pancakes. As my mother taught me, and as you will find in most cookbooks, in order to tell if the skillet is hot enough for pancakes, you dip your fingers into some water and then shake a few drops onto the skillet. If the drops just sit there or if they hit the skillet and boil, then it is not hot enough. As the temperature of the skillet increases, you reach a point where the drop of water seems to bounce and glide around the skillet. Then you know that the skillet is hot enough for pancakes. This is called the Leidenfrost Effect, and that is what we want to observe now.

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