My grandmother lives in a lakehouse in a small town in the mountains, and ever since I was a baby, my family would take frequent trips there to visit her and take some time to destress by the water. I would always become frustrated at the thought of having to walk around the lake to get to the other side, when it would take only half the time if we could simply walk right down the middle of the lake. The problem? This would require us to acquire some kind of super power that would allow us to walk on water. This got me thinking, is it possible to walk across any substance that isn’t a solid? Well I have found the answer.

On a UK television show a few years ago, John Tickle was seen walking across a pool of custard, and two physicists wanted to see if it was, indeed, possible to do so, or if it was just a trick. Jon Evans plains that “Instant custard consists of a sense suspension of microscopic particles…[which] are well known to harden on impact” (Evans). No one really knew why this occurred, though, and there were multiple explanations, but most of the explanations had problems with them.

Scott Waitakaitis at the University of Chicago, along with his colleague Heinrich Jaeger decided that he wanted to “investigate what happened when he dropped an aluminum rod onto 25 liters of custard” (Evans). What they discovered from their various types of videos that monitored the impact was that the particles of the custard, during impact, squished together to “form a depression in the surface and an expanding solid region of jammed together particles below this depression…as a result, the falling rod initially comes to an almost complete halt on the surface of the suspension, before slowly sinking as the solid region gradually ‘melts’ away” (Evans).

Custard, along with ketchup, is what is known as a non-Newtonian fluid. So while they are technically considered liquids, they don’t behave like water does. When hit by an outside force, the starch acts more like a solid than a liquid, as the particles compact into a temporarily jammed solid, which grows out from the impact site (Gregory).

This finding is exciting in the world of science because it’s not just something fun to watch on a TV screen or experiment with in your home, but it could also have practical applications in other areas of the scientific world. Waitukaitis says that not many materials have the capability of switching from soft to hard instantaneously. Knowing that custard is a material that does have this capability, he continues, “has usefulness in everything from construction to hydraulics to personal protection” (Waitukaitis).

So I guess to fix my frustration and shorten my time to get from one side of the lake to the other, all I have to do is fill the lake with custard! But lets be honest, that would clear just about twenty-five grocery stores of all of their instant custard packs. So maybe in this case, I’ll just have to deal with the extra few minutes it takes to walk around. But you never know, if we can walk on custard now, maybe one day we’ll be walking on water.