Swimming Through Syrup

It’s a puzzle that had kept physicists mildly uninterested for years: could a person swim faster though water or syrup? On the one hand syrup is gloopier than water so would be harder to push through, but on the other you can get better purchase when pushing yourself through syrup.

Well, much to everyone’s bemusement, Edward Cussler of the University of Minnesota and Brian Gettelfinger of the University of Wisconsin-Madison added a crate full of guar gum, an edible thickening agent, to a swimming pool to find out. In the words of Cussler himself, the water “looked like snot” but that didn't stop a host of professional and recreational swimmers plunged in to record their times.

The scientists discovered that the swimmers were able to complete a length of the pool in pretty much the same time whether they were swimming through water or syrupy, snotty stuff. Few people actually cared, but it did raise a smile and scooped Cussler and Gettelfinger science’s more prestigious prize.

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