Egg in a bottle
Can you fit an egg through the neck of a bottle without any difficulty? With this trick, it’s dead easy!
Get started
Step 1
Shell the hard-boiled egg and place it on the mouth of the bottle. The egg is too big to drop into the bottle without being pushed.
Step 2
Take the egg off the bottle. Ask an adult to throw three burning matches into the bottle. (This takes some skill and fire is always dangerous, so if you want to try it yourself, make sure an adult is close by.)
Step 3
Quickly put the egg back on the bottle. See what happens!
What did you discover?
Matches need oxygen to burn. When the oxygen in the bottle runs out, the matches go out. The burning matches heat the air. When they go out, the air in the bottle cools. The air contracts, lowering the pressure inside the bottle compared to outside the bottle. As a result, the egg gets pushed inside.
