Share your fond memories of chemistry class!
What do you remember most? Burning magnesium? Cool experiments with blowing stuff up? Acids and bases reactions?
What was the most fun you ever had in chemistry?
Did you even like chemistry class? Why or why not?
What’s the most interesting fact you retained from chemistry class for no apparent reason?
Feel free to post some fun stories!
The Carnation Experiment!
We were to split the stem of a white, blooming carnation, and then put each side of the stem in two bottles of water with red food colouring and one with blue food colouring. After a few days, the colouring from the opposite stems actually changed the colour of the flower’s petals! I found it fascinating.
Photo by DKImages
I have mixed memories from chemistry class…
On the good side, there were fun experiments like making silly putty (a phikhsie) to learn about polymers:
On the bad side, there was an acid/base titration where a weak acid got spilled on my hand because of my teacher.
I have a truckload of memories. Most of them ghastly :)
Ghastly memory #1 There was this time in 2001 – December or so….this really good friend of mine fell asleep in the lab. He was supposed to pour water or something equally harmless into a beaker (on a bunsen burner) – but he got some Toluene instead. And lo – flames. He snored merrily, while the whole group of us were scared to the bone.
Ghastly memory #2
There was this other friend – let’s call him P’Maniac :)
We were lab mates. While trying to synthesize some compound in an organic chemistry assignment, he was playing around with sodium. A lump of sodim fell off into the wash basin and started sizzling over the water. While there were about 20 of us, all scared yet again, Mr. P’Maniac was his usual audacious self – he just got a wash bottle from a nearby desk and squeezed it. Turns out, the wash bottle had acetone – highly flammable. The result was a bonfire in the middle of the day. He ofcourse, went and fetched the fire extinguisher and set things right.
Those memories sound pretty scary… Chem-lab fires are never pleasant. My experiments rarely involved them- we had a theory that the school was so cheap it didn’t actually have gas running through the gas taps, which is why the bunsen burners never worked. We had some bad equipment too (one bad titration pipe was leaky which was why the acid got spilled on me).
Scary I concur. But damn funny, when I think of the jackass(es) involved.
Actually, I spent a huge amount of timeevey week working in a lab – my major was Chemistry (in college).
Nasty tip: If you want to make someone so sick that they dont eat for a week, just make them smell N,N Dimethyl Pyridine. It did that to me.
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