"it's for SCIENCE"

I thought I wasn't going to have any inspiration to post about today (trying to talk about happy positive things rather than go into the Slough of Despond that some people about me seem to be doing).

Then I started writing what promised to be a hugacious comment on Ken's Mythbusters post, so I moved it over here.

Ken was talking about the MacGuyver episode of Mythbusters. My particular favorite out of that episode was the sodium bomb. I was thinking about that and I just had an intro-college-chem flashback. The prof we had (well, for that four weeks of the class - I hate team-taught classes with a passion, always have, always will) was the most awesome guy. I had the biggest teacher-crush on him ever. He was not a very big guy, blond, kind of unassuming looking (not unlike Peter Davison - from "All Creatures Great and Small" and he was also one of the iterations of Dr. Who).

But this quiet, unassuming guy was nuts for blowing stuff up. One day he walked into class (it was one of those big lecture halls with high ceilings and a bit of distance between prof and students) with a balloon and a long stick with a splint on one end. He let the balloon go, it floated up to the ceiling above him. He talked a bit about lighter-than-air gases, about helium and hydrogen and all that.

Then he lit the splint.

Taking the long stick in his hands, he lifted the burning splint up to the balloon.

LOUD explosion, considering it was just a small balloon. He had filled it with hydrogen and was showing us the explosive power of H2. He talked about how blimps are no longer filled with hydrogen. He talked about what the reaction was that had just taken place and why it happened.

He smiled out at us (he had certainly awakened all the football players in the back row) and said, quietly, "Any day I can blow something up for science is a good day."

He also did the sodium reaction with water. He came in with small jars of lithium and sodium, put on rubber gloves, carefully (under mineral oil) cut off a chunk of each, and (separately) placed each in water. The lithium fizzed and sparked a little; the sodium skated on the surface of the water and made a nice little orange flame.

"I'd like to show you potassium, too," he said regretfully, "But they won't let me have it."

Okay, maybe he was a little crazy. But I totally had the teacher-love for him - because he was so funny and self-effacing and because he went to the effort to bring in all this crazy crap to show us.

I know there were other demonstrations - I think he did the so-called "clock" or "Halloween" reaction, where a solution changes between black and orange in regular cycles. (I want to say there was also one that changed between blue and yellow, which were the school colors, but maybe I dreamed that.)

I can't even remember the guy's name (It's 20 years ago, now, and I don't think he got tenure - he was gone the next year, may have just been a one-year fill in), but I loved that class with him, loved going to class to see what I was going to learn that day (and to see what he was going to blow up). And I was sad when he finished up and was replaced by a (seriously) nearly senile guy who read from crumbling yellow notes (that were probably older than I was) and spent an entire class period talking about how he found a book in Russian on the periodic table while he was in Russia. (I remember particularly him talking about how "Hess" was transliterated in Cyrillic. Of course, I can't remember who the "Hess" was he was talking about....)