Check one item off the 'honey-do' list

Swimmer Tony Swanson of Coon Rapids, Minn., displays a handful of undissolved guar from the bottom of the test pool in Cooke Hall.

by Rick Moore

From M, fall 2003

Ed Cussler has wondered for 30 years what it would be like to swim in a pool of honey. More specifically, the chemical engineering professor has wondered how swimming in a pool filled with a substance of greater viscosity than water (i.e., a thicker, more resistant substance) would affect speed. (He speculated that it would make little difference.)

In mid-August, his query and theory were put to the test in an experiment he funded at the University of Minnesota that was equal parts deep science and reality TV. Study participants, including swimmers from the Gopher men's and women's swim teams, swam trials in both a regular pool and a pool filled with 700 pounds of guar--a bean-extract thickener used in ice cream and shampoo--mixed with water. Cameras from virtually all the Twin Cities media outlets ate up the spectacle but stayed out of the guar, and newspapers and TV stations from around the country picked up the story.

"Eeew," said one swimmer upon exiting the pool to the slippery deck. "That stuff is just like snot on the bottom," added another. "It's so much fun."

All fun aside, the experiment yielded some interesting preliminary results. Across various strokes, times in the guar-filled pool were virtually the same as those in the regular pool.

"Any normal person would think you're going to slow down [in the guar pool]," points out Frank Bates, head of the chemical engineering department. "That there's no perceptible effect is counter-intuitive."

Cussler says there was a good deal of debate around the U among students and faculty prior to the experiment, and there were a number of professors who thought that times in the guar pool might be 10 percent slower. Ultimately, while the results seemed to confirm Cussler's speculation, he was even more pleased that students had a chance to test their theories in a slimy new realm.