OK we're baaaaaaack!!!!

Every morning I faithfully drink a cup (at least) of coffee .... by my second cup I start shaking and I begin to see a primary wave appear on the surface. The more coffee I drink (whoa sometimes up to four cups!) the faster I shake and sometimes a secondary wave shows up. I am struck by how similar a coffee wave is to an electron's wave that creates the orbitals that we talk about in Chem 201. The difference is that the coffee wave is made by many water molecules constrained in 2D space while an orbital is the picture of the wave of a single electron constrained in 3D space. Caution: do not confuse the orbital wave with the wave of electron(s) trapped in a quantum corral of Fe atoms in the video.

This past weekend as I was drinking my morning coffee, I was greeted by a cacophany of barks.

I realize I have never actually been in a hot air balloon but have talked about how hot air balloons work while teaching Chem 203 (the first year chemistry course on chemical change and equilibrium). If I think of travel in a balloon versus a car, travel is much slower in a balloon. It reminds me of a great video with Brian Cox and Jim Al Khalili that shows how relative time may differ when perspectives differ. Though this is not the case when comparing the balloon to a car, I ask what is time? This video brought up a scary thought ..... we so freely talk of something that we know so little about! Oh wait ... in a way that is just what happens when most people start to talk politics with one another.

On their first day, the Chem 201 class had a demo on nail polish. As I'd like to revisit it later in the term, once students have a deeper understanding of chemical structure, I had to find out what chemical structures were in nail polish. It seems that the first commercial formulations were based on car paint! I found a video on the chemistry of nail polish, which not only mentioned the car connection but took me back to when I was first teaching. I did a series of talks highlighting how what students learned in first year helped with the understanding of forensic science. This was in the day and age when the show, CSI, first came out. I had talked about the forensics of car paint. An interesting fact was that nitrocellulose was historically one of the key chemical species in the car paint. Nitrocellulose is often used in first year as a demonstration of how a change in functional group changes reactivity.

Nail polish is a great example of a very complex mixture of chemicals. Each chemical species contributes to a certain property of the final mixture. I liked that the guy in the chemistry of nail polish video tried making it using an ancient recipe, but was not very successful. It is a great lesson about the importance of mixing ingredients properly. This is a common mistake made by students when they first do a synthesis experiment (Chem 201 stay tuned for Experiment 3). This is also an important skill of a successful baker.