View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-to-unboil-an-egg-eleanor-nelsen It's so obvious that it's practically proverbial: you can't unboil an egg. But actually, it turns out...
========== It's so obvious
that it's practically proverbial.You can't unboil an egg.Well, it turns out you can, sort of.What thermal energy
does to the eggs' molecules,mechanical energy can undo.Eggs are mostly made
of water and proteins.The proteins start off
folded up into intricate shapes,held together by weak chemical bonds.Adding heat disrupts those bonds,allowing the proteins to unfold,
uncoil, unwind and wiggle freely.This process is called denaturing.The newly liberated proteins
bump up against their neighborsand start to form
new bonds with each other,more and more as the heat increases,until finally, they're so entangled
that they gel into a solid mass,a boiled egg.That entanglement might look
permanent, but it's not.Accordi...
