Colours and explosions

6th of May, Imperial College graduate school hosted an entertaining event based around demonstrating chemical reactions. 'Experiments' was the first word that came to mind, but it probably wasn't the right one. It was a show more than anything else.

The demonstrators, with their tie dyed lab coats, are researchers based at Brighton University. Part of the night's event was to demonstrate an iPad application they have collaborated in producing: 'Theodore Gray, the Elements'. It is a periodic table, in the form of an interactive electronic book, with detailed animated pictures of each of the elements. It was beautiful enough to earn a couple of audible gasp from the younger members of the audience, especially when projected onto a large screen. Theodore Gray, I've learned, is some kind of mad scientist (by 'mad' I meant 'cool') who won an Ig Nobel for his 'periodic table', a piece of furniture filled with elements. His team have then been installing elemental exhibits in several museums in America.

Out of the three main branch of science (biology, chemistry, physics) which is the best to design a demonstration based show around? Physics is well in fashion these days, and that any geek seems to be about to sprout endless facts about black holes and quantum mechanics, though personally I haven't seen many stage worthy demonstrations beyond gyroscopic effects and Van der Graaf generators. Showing off biology to people tends to involve demonstration of nature, perhaps with monkeys (or other cute things). In my opinion though chemistry puts on the best shows among the sciences, with its smokes, colour changes, and fireworks. And I feel that chemical reactions are still mysterious to a lot of people.

Yes, many of the reactions that night made a lot of sound. The first reaction was pretty enough, lighting up soap bubbles filled with hydrogen, which gave fireballs. It was when they fill the bubbles with hydrogen and oxygen in 'stoichiometric' amount it caused fireballs accompanied by impressive explosions, causing a child behind me to cower, and took all advice of covering of the ears seriously. Other explosions that evening include opening of a can of bake beans with lead azide (used commercially as a detonator) (an audience member was hit by some of the beans), liquid oxygen (I never knew that oxygen is actually blue), and something that involved carbon disulphide and nitrate of some sort. As for the colour changing reactions, the only one I remembered was an autocatalytic reaction (not really sure what that meant, and hence to me, mysterious) involving iodine, where a column of solution changed for cloudy to black to cloudy again repeatedly.

At the event, I noticed that the audience members were comprised of more than just postgrads. There were row full of kids, accompanied by their professor parents. Naturally, a fun evening of chemistry like this is designed for kids. I was thinking about opportunities: kids like that have enormous advantages, in terms of science at least, with caring and enthusiastic parents, who encourage kids by taking them to events such as these, as well as being able to explain what went on afterwards. No amount of government policy or external intervention can replicate this kind of help.