Experiments!

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What experiments have you carried out in the lab? Can be at school, college or in yr place of work.

And did they all go horribly wrong???

― MarkH (MarkH), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 08:58 (twenty-three years ago)

What experiments have you carried out in the lab?

ALL OF THEM! Now experiments: search and destroy!

Search: anything with lasers
Destroy: anything with plants

― Alan (Alan), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 10:35 (twenty-three years ago)

Anything involving fire = classic

― RickyT (RickyT), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 10:40 (twenty-three years ago)

Anything involving ether = double classic

― RickyT (RickyT), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 10:41 (twenty-three years ago)

Anything involving both = big triple dud

― RickyT (RickyT), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 10:41 (twenty-three years ago)

I always found experiments boring, because they never let us do much.

― jel -- (jel), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 10:43 (twenty-three years ago)

Alan, have you experimented on the brains of aliens found at the sites of UFO crashes?

― jel -- (jel), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 10:45 (twenty-three years ago)

almost certainly (if such an experiment existed in the GCSE syllabus, perhaps that was Sc1 level 8, http://www.ncaction.org.uk/subjects/science/levels.htm#1 )

― Alan (Alan), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 10:52 (twenty-three years ago)

Sodium + Water = Jonathon + Jennifer Hart.

― Pete (Pete), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 11:00 (twenty-three years ago)

we used to make pottasium nitrate for smoke bombs. we had to do all the lab work in a local forest, and we used to 'borrow' the nearby farmyards chemical fertilizer.

One day we decided to dry out the mixture on a pan over a slow fire, oh yeah, we were dumb. A tiny ember landed right in the middle of the pan and we just legged it while the whole forest was white with smoke.

― Fuzzy (Fuzzy), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 11:08 (twenty-three years ago)

Anything involving fire

blatant anecdote/repost avoidance: FIRE!

― Alan (Alan), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 11:14 (twenty-three years ago)

I was forever breaking test tubes and because we got charged for all broken glassware, I used to put the broken bits in my pocket while the teacher wasn't looking. It was a minor miracle that I never actually cut the inside of my pocket with the shards or, indeed, my leg.

I remember when we did an experiment involving a boiling tube clamped over a beaker of boiling water, one kid in my class managed to unscrew the wrong clamp by accident and send the tube crashing through the bottom of the beaker. It did so with such force that it left a circular hole in the bottom of the beaker and of course boiling water went everywhere.

― MarkH (MarkH), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 11:35 (twenty-three years ago)

Burning magnesium = CLASSIC.

― Matt DC (Matt DC), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 11:40 (twenty-three years ago)

Using a burning magnesium fuse to ignite a mixture of reactive metal+unreactive metal salt = DOUBLE CLASSIC.

― SittingPretty (sittingpretty), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 11:45 (twenty-three years ago)

None of these are valid experiments because you havent written them up properly.

― Tom (Groke), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 11:49 (twenty-three years ago)

Any one where the teacher had to erect a screen or conduct the whole experiment in a cupboard = always classic.

I think I falsified the results in every single experiment in my Chemistry GCSE class. I just didn't get that it mattered HOW I arrived at the right answer. I had a similar problem with algebra.

― Archel (Archel), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 11:52 (twenty-three years ago)

since the lint from a laudromat is mainly made of human skin, we built a frankenstein machine powered by bolts of lightening and brought it to life (and named it steve penk)

― mark s (mark s), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 12:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Surely you named after that bloke who is presenting Family Fortunes now. He truly has no personality.

― Pete (Pete), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 12:09 (twenty-three years ago)

that would be silly

― mark s (mark s), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 12:14 (twenty-three years ago)

SOrry. Wasn't thinking. Won't do it again.

― Pete (Pete), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 12:16 (twenty-three years ago)

that's what i do at work (and in between i post here of course). and its nothing to do with explosions either.

most of them go wrong but that's OK.

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 14:10 (twenty-three years ago)

Pete, he does, you know - he's a decent chap. I worked with him a few years ago - friendly and down-to-earth. His name's Andy Collins.

― Mark C (Mark C), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 15:47 (twenty-three years ago)

Over the last summer and fall I spend much time in a class 10 clean room making noses. I would spin a photo sensitive layer onto a silicon chip and then developed a design I made onto it. Then I would lay down some aluminum and etch (cut away) with some horribly toxic chemicals until a small piece of aluminum remains. It is suspeneded between two pads where when a current is put the small bridge of aluminum acts as a resistor. If a small gap is form a small carbon nanotube can be placed onto it and it would act like a nose depending on how the nanotube reacts as monitered by the resitance of the entire structure, you could tell what smells are around.

― A Nairn (moretap), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 16:18 (twenty-three years ago)

Well, in my personal DC Style Lab, a recent experiment with snakeskin-print denim boot-cuts came out tragically wrong.

― j.lu (j.lu), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 16:23 (twenty-three years ago)

I remember being handed printed notes during A level chemistry that said something like WARNING: DANGEROUS GASES! THIS EXPERIMENT MUST ONLY BE CONDUCTED IN A FUME CUPBOARD! and the teacher saying "Oh, don't worry about that. Just open the window at the back there, you'll be all right." You couldn't do that in America, or he'd have four solicitors on the phone to him within nanoseconds.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 19:45 (twenty-three years ago)

as someone who has done a degree a degree in chemistry I have to say that its not only at A level where liberties are taken with safety regulations.

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 21:53 (twenty-three years ago)

We filled a test tube with sodium and asked a hated classmate to put water in it. He eyed us suspiciously and asked what it was. After we told him, he said, "Oh, okay," and stuck it under a running tap. It made a beautiful fountain.

― Dan Perry (Dan Perry), Wednesday, 8 January 2003 22:55 (twenty-three years ago)

in organic chem lab, there was this experiment...i wish i remembered the substances involved. i think it involved distillation, and a myriad of other steps, naturally. meh, details.

in any case, you ended up with a (so it turned out) volatile, thick, icky-green colored substance.

a friend of mine in the class had a tendency to disregard instructions. y'know, what steps to do when, that sort of thing. so he put the icky-green-stuff beaker over his bunsen burner at an apparently inopportune time. it had a rather dramatic effect--this stuff shot straight up so forcefully as to leave a nasty green 3D blotch on the ceiling. luckily the trajectory was straight up. with only the ceiling affected, it was much more amusing than, say, chemical burns.

upon looking at the ceiling more closely, there were similar blotches around, long ago dried. so it seems that such mistakes had happened before with that experiment. exploding nasty green stuff certainly makes a 4 hour chem lab a bit more interesting.

and then there was the superconcentrated acetic acid splash that taught me how many layers of skin i really have on my hand...ooooh, cool. luckily a very small splash.

despite the drama, i don't much miss organic chem lab.

― JuliaA (j_bdules), Thursday, 9 January 2003 04:29 (twenty-three years ago)

i owe my prematurely receding hairline to organic chemistry. grrrr

― electric sound of jim (electricsound), Thursday, 9 January 2003 04:30 (twenty-three years ago)

Well, there was the time in high school my dad had the chunk of pure sodium and the full tub or water or something. Apparently the teacher forgave him after his eyebrows grew back in, but the windows all needed replacing.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Thursday, 9 January 2003 06:06 (twenty-three years ago)

I only remember the hokey pokey. It was like the hokey tokey only more soda-y.

― maryann (maryann), Thursday, 9 January 2003 08:07 (twenty-three years ago)

We threw little leftover capsules of cesium out the window of our lab, watching the little purpley-blue fire explosion when the glass ampule shattered, exposing the cesium to the air. Mechanics experiment or chemistry experiment? We were aiming for the roof of a shed.

― Marianna, Thursday, 9 January 2003 14:24 (twenty-three years ago)

i owe my prematurely receding hairline to organic chemistry.

haha, like a minor league Lex Luthor!

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Thursday, 9 January 2003 18:28 (twenty-three years ago)

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