This guy went so deep into the analogy that I have no idea how it actually works.

teacher:do you know why water and oil are not mixing? student:because oils are terrible dancer

The writer was all "They're square dancing", the animator however decided, "Screw that, it's a disco."

I've learned some pretty advanced stuff with simplified analogy, but this is way too metaphorical for me to extract any hard science information.

What? How could you dumb down something so much to the point where you don't understand anything

You made simple thing complex.

very stupid analogy. it said nothing about ion attractions or polarity.

Well, the analogy wasn't wrong at all but I just understood something because I was previously reading about it, but those who don't really know did get confused because well... Practically nothing was explained here.

i dont mind analogies but this... this is too MUCH!

I love how creative this is. It shows us a different way of thinking. It's like taking book knowledge and grasping it with your mind. It helps you to not memorize, but really learn how things work :)

"Water and oil don't mix because they just don't make good dance partners." WHAT THE FUCK.

Sorry, but in this video the analogies got way out of hands and basically no real science is left in this video

I think this would have been much more simpler if you went into actual detail as opposed to telling a children's story

this video was garbage, the analogy went so deep i didnt learn anything except that oil wears a dress and water doesnt want to dance because of it

This is more of a metaphor than an analogy. The difference is that, in an analogy, you explain something, then compare it to something else to make it easier to understand. In a metaphor, you just say something figurative and the person listening has to already know what you're talking about in order to understand. So, in my point of view, it isn't very efficient to make an "educational metaphor", which is what this video essentially is.

I don't mind when analogies are used to help describe scientific concepts, but this is just too much.

*reads title* Oh I already know this but I'm watching it anyway *watches video* Ok I definitely didn't know /this/

I loved this. As I watched this, it made me laugh because I could see the interactions between molecules happen in a dynamic way, and I could also relate it to the lessons I've been taught in chemistry. This is easy for less experienced people to understand and for more experienced people to see their knowledge applied in a different perspective.

there ist definitely too much party in my glass of water

Lesson learned: Water likes thin dancers, not *fat oily dancers*.

Oil floats on water 1.Wait for rain 2.Cover yourself on oil 3.fly

Now, can you please explain this in chemistry? 😩😭

if you hate metaphors here is a short answer the oil molecules are too big to mix with the water molecules

Wait for it to rain

Those damn analogies. "I'm not gonna tell you: The universe is like a ball on a spring. It's not" - Richard Feynman

I cant even understand what are you talking about,I hope that you can just use the pro terms....... I think the people who are interested in this video already got a certain level of chemistry knowledge.

I like how he used dancing to explain why oil and water don't mix. Love the animation, too.

Oil floats on water. Step 1: Wait for it to rain. Step 2: Cover yourself in oil. Step 3: Fly.

Yeah I think I could have handled a little more science

"The problem is that the oil molecules are wearing gigantic ball gowns" Oohhh, I see

I came here to learn about chemistry. Instead, I learned nothing.

Obviously he's doing something right to have been used by TED Ed while you guys sit here and comment all day lol

Great metaphor! It helped me apply scientific terms I am a bit familiar with in order to understand this topic.

I feel like I just watched a kids cartoon.

worst ted ed video I've watched

Guys, basically, water molecules are moving. When sugar is mixed with water, the sugar breaks into small pieces and gets dragged by other water molecules, thus dissolving. The movement between water molecules is crucial, however oil molecules disruppt that, so water pushes the oil up to keep the bond. That is why they never mix

This doesn't deserve this much hate, the analogy is good and the idea of the dance floor is brilliant. Kudos to John Pollard and Andrew Foerster

I don't see how anyone can not get lost somewhere along the analogy. When you're telling the analogy, you should explain what real-world concept each part of the analogy represents either during or after the analogy.

If anyone wants to know how it actually works: Short version- Water and oil create different types of bonds, so they can't mix. Long version- Water creates a type of bond called hydrogen bond. In a hydrogen bond, the atom connected to the hydrogen (in this case, the oxygen) has a high electronegativity (it pulls electrons hard), which leaves the hydrogen effectively electronless, and therefore positive, while the oxygen gets two extra electrons and becomes negative. NaCl (salt) is made out of positive Na ions and negative Cl ions. when they are in water the Na ions are attracted to the negative oxygen and the Cl ions are attracted to the positive hydrogens, so they seperate and mix with the water. Oil, on the other hand, is held together by van der waals forces, which are affected by the number of electrons in a molecule and are not affected a lot by charge. Soap creates both hydrogen bonds and van der waals interactions, so it can bond with both oil and water, so it can play the middleman and let oil dissolve in water. Seriously TED, I already knew how this works and I had very little idea what you were talking about in the video.

this was dumbed down too much I really could not understand... and I usually get it at the 1st watch

This is the weirdest explanation ever. Seriously, what?

Ted Ed makes a mixture of knowledge and humor along with visual graphics which makes us grasp the concept and understand it at one glance. Thank you Ted Ed.

if i write water and oil dont mix because they dont make great dance partners.... i will definitely fail with teacher laughing at my paper along with students

The analogies in this video are top level

This explanation gets lost in it's own analogy. Really terrible, sorry.

I am still in Primary, and this video's explanation actually helped me understand this concept a lot easier.

made no sense at all, water, salt and oil at a nightclub?

my teacher showed it to my class.. we never laughed that hard! it was awesome.

So... According to this, salt mixes with water because it can dance good and oil doesn't mix with water because it wears a huge gown and can't dance properly?

Thank you for breaking it down like that...

This one was a little too ELI5 for my tastes, the animation was nice however

I swear the animated explanation always make me understand things more.

terrible lol.... only makes sense if you already understand lots of chemistry i think

The ball gown is a lipid layer that it charged so I can't let molecules in or join others. Whereas a table salt or sodium chloride is much smaller and not charged carbon bound molecule that easily enters the uncharged surface layer of water

TED-Ed too much of animation is distracting and makes it hard to make sense( science) out of it.

Every now and then I’m reminded of this analogy.

*Oil Floats on water Flashbacks*

check that water molecule in the background at 4:06. that guy is seriously POUNDING IT!!

not once did you even mention polarity and non-polarity.....

I'm a chemist .. this cracked me up! I LOVED the oil ladies!! Snobs ... I would have explained it a little differently ... when two different substances are mixed together, as it was explained to me, when they are similar, like if they are polar or ionic (like salt), they "mix" because one substance can replace another at the molecular level, because they're similar thus they "dissolve" and can no longer be seen as separte. Oil and water are very different - oils are not polar and are made up of very long chains, where water is small and polar - so an oil molecule cannot replace and displace a water molecule next to itself so they stay separate and it never dissolves ... if I could use my hands and arms to explain, it would help!

*reads the title* Me: Oh okay, it's gonna be interesting *after watching the video* Me: hmm...So that's what it is. Pfft Who am i kidding I did not Understand anything

These adverts are killing my by the day

loved the metaphor...

As far as using this video to introduce a complex idea such as entropy to students at a level that is below being able to fully explain how it works I think this video is great! It broke down a very complex set of ideas and laws and rules and made it an approachable concept to begin thinking about. It hurts my soul to hear molecules being talked about as being "happy" or "sad" but overall I think this is a very helpful video, good job Dr. Pollard, you make me love chemistry!

Wow this is an amazing example I love it 😀

This is a great introduction to the concept of entropy as it relates to chemical properties. In high school, I was only told that "entropy is disorder." After studying chemistry in college, I have a much deeper understanding that allows me to appreciate the beauty in this seemingly simple analogy. Entropy is a very abstract concept, and this video does a good job of making the ideas more tangible, particularly for high school students just starting to study chemistry.

DJ ENTROPY :)

My car blew a head gasket it did mix pretty good, oops I meant a bad mix.

I have no damn of what so ever this guy is talking about. Only thing I understand is the title of the video.

The analogy is meant to create a visual for what entropy is on the molecular level (which is often misunderstood). Basically what the video is stating is that the mixed state of oil and water is of lower entropy than the unmixed state. So the non-mixing is driven by entropy not by the strength of attractive forces between molecules. The analogy is meant describe entropy which is not so easy when configurational stability leads to separation.

love the analogies great way to teach by relating to something most people do every week :)

Your description is incorrect on many levels. First, the attractive forces between molecules is not "magnetic", it is based on the distribution of electrons at any given time. Second, there are attractive forces between water and oil molecules which is the energetics. So that is also incorrect. The reason they do not mix is because there are more ways they can configure in space and distribute energy when unmixed. That is entropy and it is the driving force for them not mixing.

Very Bad Analogy! Time has been wasTED.

Building off of what Sebastian posted, ΔH refers to the energetics, ΔS refers to the entropy and ΔG is a term that combines the two to make an overall prediction. With salt+water, ΔH is + meaning it is not favored by energetics so entropy (or configurations through random motion as the vid describes) is what drives salt to dissolve. For oi+water, the ΔH is nearly zero so it is the entropy that drives the two to separate...hence the analogy.

This is a bit silly. No mention of differing densities or hydrophylic/hydrophobic effects.

Guys think about it. This was very well put together in a very simplistic manner. Cleverly explains why oil doesn't dissolve. Excellent video!

Simple. Oil has much density than water, that's why you can't mix oil to water.

John Pollard just subbed my chem class, star struck?

This is a stupid example

Hey, ted ed has been doing an incredible job of educating all of us. If one video is too hard for you to comprehend or its' analogy to complicated for you, just move on to the next video because there is a myriad of videos from ted ed that can be easily digested. I think this video is incredible again and the animation is cool and engaging.

It's kinda amusing to see everyone in the comments being frustrated over the same thing as I am :D :D This video got so oversimplified that it was actually harder for me to understand it. The entire time I had to convert the analogy into real scientific terms

Yes, that is a more correct statement. The process is driven by entropy. I would say that the it is through random motion that the ions move into the water and do not reform the lattice. So, higher kinetic energy ions have sufficient energy when randomly colliding with water molecules to enter the h-bonding network and be solvated like you describe. That is a higher entropy state which means the probability of moving back to the lattice is very low. Good thinking kohyihung!

This was like a video not made by TED-Ed. It was horrible.

and this was somehow more satisfying than "why?" "chemistry!"? Could have as well left it at that.

So salts are ... Asian people????

am i the only one that finds straightforward explanations rly easy to understand and cant get shit out of analogies and stuff

Very dissatisfying .

The emulsifier would be a molecule that can engage in the H-bonding dance with water AND effectively dance with oil. Using the analogy, the emulsifier would reduce the frustration that the water experiences with the large and poorly dancing oils being around AND reduces the bad feelings the oils have by being segregated by pulling them onto the dance floor in small groups to dance. The emulsifier is an extremely versatile dancer that helps oil and water mix. Again, it is driven by entropy.

horrible explanation!

so the answer I have to write in exam is they don't mix because they just don't make great partners

this is the worst explanation ive ever heard!

The oil explanation was amazing.

I didn't know that it was possible to make a simple topic like polar and unpolar solvents so difficult...

Hydrophobicity is a word used to describe that things do not mix with water but it does not explain why they do not mix. Describing the polarity of molecules isn't actually needed to explain why they do not mix but I do appreciate the suggestion and that could be part of another video which applies polarity concepts to other observable things. Thanks.

I was waiting for the explanation... yep, still waiting

I think you missed what I meant by 'literally'. The molecules don't dance in the sense of having legs, arms and heads and moving around on a discofloor, oil molecules don't wear dresses and entropy isn't a disk jockey. My point was that the analogy seemed to be more in focus than the principles it was trying to explain.

It should be noted that while the entropy of the system tends to go down when mixing oil and water at room temperature there is also strong temperature dependence to the entropy. As a result in hot water the entropy would go up upon mixing. The strong temperature dependence of the entropy however belies a strong temperature dependence of the energetics as well such that dissolution is opposed by energetics in hot water (and no the polarity of the two substances did not change). The final result is that oil is pretty insoluble over all temperatures, but at low temperatures it is opposed by entropy and favored by energy, but at high temperatures it is favored by entropy and opposed by energy. That is to say the heat capacity has a role to play as well!

sometimes being technical is more easy to understand.

I think the reason there are a lot of dislikes may be because a lot of people carry the misconception that polarity is an explanation for why they do not mix...which is incorrect. Entropy is the driving force for their separation so using polar/nonpolar would not be correct. The video is meant to use an analogy to illustrate entropy which is a tough concept.

Wait. I just started reading the comments and how is this not helpful? How is this not fricking understandable? HOW ARE YALL LOST? He made it as clear as water!!!!