When I was a kid my mom worked at the community college setting up experiments for the chemistry classes while she studied to be a medical laboratory technician. She’d occasionally let me hang out with her while she was working. I’m sure I annoyed the crap out of her and everyone else around, but it was the best thing ever for a young science nerd. Chemistry was fascinating! I learned fun things like how you can dissolve white phosphorus in carbon disulfide to make a solution that will slowly evaporate and then burst into flames. It has lots of practical applications, like making candles that spontaneously light themselves. Or you can soak a piece of filter paper in it and put it on top of a graduated cylinder to demonstrate the classic “barking dog” experiment. It’s amazingly useful stuff! I learned that sodium reacts violently in water and that it’s stored in oil to keep it from reacting with the moisture in the air. If you want to throw a big chunk of sodium in a large body of water, say an overflow pond behind a community college, you have to use quite a bit of force. If you don’t there’s a significant danger that the viscous oil will keep it from going very far. If it lands at the edge of the water it’ll just sit there and sizzle for a little while before the explosion hurls fist-sized rocks all over the area. Maybe the coolest experiment though is the “old nassau reaction” You mix three clear liquids together and a few seconds later it turns orange! Then a few seconds more and it turns black! You can adjust the timing by varying the concentrations of the three solutions. To a young kid, it’s nothing short of magic.

I’m looking forward to reliving some of my childhood memories tomorrow night. The chemistry department at the University of Illinois is putting on their Holiday Magic Chemistry Demonstration Show again this year! It’s great fun, so if you’re in the neighbourhood I definitely recommend checking it out. I believe they’ll be streaming the show live on Saturday at 2pm as well.