During Chem Lecture today, Mr Lai, out of "sheer randomness" took out a koli and asked us if we thought it was a 4 dollar koli from NTUC or a 200 dollar one. If you don't see the relation to organic chem yet, read on :). Most of us, being rational, scientific thinkers, thought he was speaking in jest. To prove his point, he placed his koli on the visualiser and said it could conduct heat so well that he could fry an egg on it, simply using the light from the visualiser. Still sceptical, I watched as he added cooking oil and cracked the egg and sure enough, the transparentness of the egg white began to turn well, white. And although the egg yolk did not seem to get the opaque yellow of cooked eggs, I was quite convinced the koli was indeed made of some super-conductor material or something along those lines.
Then, he revealed the secret of his 200 dollar koli. The oil wasn't cooking oil after all, but lead nitrate dyed yellow! So the whitening of the egg white was actually some chemical reaction occuring... Which meant, the 200 dolar koli was really worth 4 bucks. Guess it was a timely demonstration, my interest in organic chemistry is waning fast as the number of equations threatens to increase. But the demo has managed to sustained it.
For a while.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment