Answer 1:
Thank you for your question! As a balloon
inflates, the air pressure (or helium pressure)
inside the balloon changes. It can be
theoretically and experimentally shown that the
pressure increases until the balloon radius is
about 1.4x the uninflated radius. Above that
point, the pressure continually decreases until
eventually the balloon pops. The wikipedia article
on the "Two-balloon experiment" shows this. It's
very interesting!
Let's assume the balloon is inflated at
constant temperature. Using the ideal gas law, we
can see the that density of air molecules (N/V) is
directly proportional to the air pressure. This
means that as the pressure increases, the air
molecules are closer to each other, and attract
each other more strongly due to van der Waals
interactions. Because the pressure inside the
balloon is typically not very large (about 1%
greater than atmospheric), these van der Waals
interactions are mostly unaffected during
inflation. Thus, the largest difference
molecularly is simply the density of air (or
helium) molecules.
Sincerely,
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