I’m staring into my whisky wondering why it looks so swirly, like there is a lot of weird like refraction going on, and google cannot answer my question.
In: Chemistry
Do you have ice in it? It’s the water melting into the alcohol.
Water and your alcoholic drink have different indices of refraction. The index of refraction is how light bends when it passes through the material, kind of like how a branch halfway in water will appear to “bend” where it crosses the water level. This same principle bends the light as it passes through alcohol and water, which looks different than light passing through just water or just alcohol. This gives it that slightly distorted look.
Water and alcohol have different densities. This means that they interact with light differently. The scientific term for this is the “index of refraction”. When you mix two chemicals with different indicies of refraction, you will get a swirling effect as the chemicals mix that will disappear when mixing is complete.
It is a similar effect to when you see distortion due to hot air rising from a hot object. The hot air is less dense, and so has a different index of refraction than the colder air it is rising into.
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