Why do water drops sink into paper but only sit in a bubble on plastic?
You’ve asked in the physic’s category, so I’ll assume that you want a more technical, complete answer. But this might be much more detailed than you wanted. You see, if you put a drop of mercury on the paper, it would form a bead, just like water does on waxed paper. And although a mercury molecule is larger than a water molecule, it is still much much smaller than the holes in a piece of paper. So the ‘holes in the paper’ cannot be the whole answer. You may know about surface tension. That is the way that the molecules of a liquid ‘attract’ other molecules. If you put water on a waxed surface, the water molecules are very good at attracting other water molecules, but they are not attracted to the waxed paper. That means that the water molecules form bonds with the other water molecules by linking their electron shells, but not with the waxed paper molecules. if you put water into a glass tube or even a narrow glass, you can see that the water forms a miniscus: the water clings to the
