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48 comments to "5 Scientific Laws and the Scientists Behind Them"

Parker
May 12th, 2008 at 3:09 am
That section on Hooke is amazing..the fights with other famous scientists and his casual description of colleague Leeuwenhoek’s discoveries of small organisms, fascinating!
William Mullins
May 12th, 2008 at 5:36 am
From experimental demonstration gone horribly wrong file:

In my college “Physics for Poets” class, which we always called Physics for Idiots, we were doing an experiment about the propagation of waves, I think. I’m not too sure, as you will see, I’ve blocked the experience out from my memory as much as I can. The professor had a large section of o-ring gasket, used to seal oil tanks, I believe. This was stretched across the front of the classroom, struck at one end, and we watched the wave propagate back and forth. Now, this classroom was not too big, so it was hard to see the effect that the professor was talking about, so he asked for volunteers to take the gasket out into the hall and duplicate the demonstration, joking how dangerous it was. I jokingly volunteered a friend, and the professor said, okay, so my friend volunteered me right back. We brought the gasket into the hall, stretched it the length of the hall, probably 70 to 100 feet, with two people behind each of us, sort of like a really clueless tug-of-war game. The professor stood at the other end of the hall from my team, and struck the gasket with a ruler. The wave propagated back and forth along the gasket a few times, very impressively, and the next thing I knew I was laying on the ground with a whole bunch of rubber gasket piled up against my guts. The sheer absurdity of the situation, combined with the extreme pain I was in caused me to, when I got my breath back, to laugh very literally hysterically. When the ashen faced professor came up to me, I was able to choke out the words “I’d better get an A for this lab.”, which I think I did. I went to the school nurse, who agreed that although it looked really awful to have huge purple bruises, let us say between just above the knees to just below the navel, I did not have any serious internal injuries. The horrifying bruises took about a month to go away completely. Oh, the things I wouldn’t do for SCIENCE! Top that!
Roger3
May 12th, 2008 at 5:49 am
WRT #3 and the Bernoulli Principle, the description of how airplane wings work is false. What you are describing is called the “Equal Transit Time” fallacy and can be easily disproved by having an airplane fly upside down or by using a symmetrical wing.
Daniel Tan
May 12th, 2008 at 6:05 am
During a Chemistry experiment in Year 10, we were testing what are the basic Chemicals that can cause explosion. One interesting part of it is to directly burn the concentrated materials in a plastic flask outside the lab.

One of the naughtier boys was chosen by the teacher to light up the wick that leads to a solid Potassium. Not knowing the property of Potassium that reacts strongly to flame, that boy casually litted the wick and waited for something to happen. As expected, the solid Potassium of the size of a small pinch of cheese exploded in rapid reaction and gave all of us a shock. Lol. None of us expected it!

When we settled down, the boy was gone from sight. His friend tried to look for him, and found him 5 minutes later under one of the lab benches shivering and tearing. LOL. Poor guy!
Seph
May 12th, 2008 at 7:05 am
As a high school professor of physics at an American School abroad, I used to do a very similar thing as Cliff when introducing laws, equations, theorems, etc. to my students… except I just invented first names and sometimes life stories for the scientists. At first the kids really believed in Alejandro Hooke or Bobby Farenheit, and once they figured out the game, begged me to continue with every new concept. We got to Lord Kelvin and they would not belive that was really his name… go figure.

When I left the school, my seniors gave me their generation shirt with the nickname “Tony Celsius” in honor of the most gangster physics name ever invented. Still wear it all the time.
Andrew Woodbridge
May 12th, 2008 at 7:25 am
I’m a high school science teacher in Queens, NY. I had the pleasure of teaching Electricity. I based my class on “There Are No Electrons” by Kenn Amdahl. When discussing static electricity and the fact that electricity will flow only from N-type materials to P-type materials I ended up with a cat on the board facing a window with the cat being charged. Static electricity will only go from the cat to the window, not the other way. At this point my Principal walks into the room and just looks at the board, I’m kinda scared at this point because I’m torturing a cat on the board. He leaves, and comes back with three or four other teachers and they just stand at the back of the room laughing. I did have a student come up and explain the diagram and what it meant, and I still have my job.
Jud
May 12th, 2008 at 7:35 am
In high school, I had the displeasure of having the resident “Coach” as my chemistry teacher. He never believed anyone when they requested a bathroom break and always insisted on pressing their abdomen just to be sure they had to go. This of course resulted in one of my more humorous high school memories as he pressed the reigning prom queen’s stomach only to have her pee all over herself.

Of course his crowning achievement was when he set the lab on fire by dropping too much potassium into some water which caused a large enough reaction to catch the ceiling on fire… ahh those were the days.
Sidd
May 12th, 2008 at 7:50 am
haha, this is ironic
I have the AP physics C exam later this afternoon, and instead of studying I’m reading this awesome site, but NO, fate wants me to learn physics
time to go study simple harmonic motion . . .
Sidd
May 12th, 2008 at 7:51 am
haha, this is ironic
I have the AP physics C exam later this afternoon, and instead of studying I’m reading this awesome site, but NO, fate wants me to learn physics
time to go study simple harmonic motion . . .
(sorry if this turns out to be a double post)
Katie
May 12th, 2008 at 8:06 am
I teach high school geology. When we get to the Law of Superposition, which states older rock layers are on the bottom and younger layers are on top—I usually say “the super-position” and remind them that the older is on the bottom and the younger is on the top—-their dirty 15 year old minds go just where I want them too–and they never forget it. Who knew karma sutra like insinuation could help in geology.

As a side note, I am working on my masters in STS, and this article was really appreciated by me.
Ashley
May 12th, 2008 at 8:56 am
My organic chemistry professor told me a story about a time when he was a graduate student working in a chem lab. He was always the one that disposed of the lithium aluminum hydride, which ignites when it touches water. One of the undergraduate freshman chemistry students heard of this awesome reaction and wanted to come watch, and my professor let him. What my professor forgot, however, was that he had been cleaning glassware in the sink earlier, so it had acetone all over the bottom of the sink. Acetone is -very- flammable. So my professor pours the lithium aluminum hydride into the sink and up shoots a column of flame large enough to touch the ceiling. The freshman was in complete awe, and my professor, not wanting to admit his mistake, just let him think that’s what the chemical does on its own.
Jess
May 12th, 2008 at 9:09 am
In 12th grade, I accidentally called my male biology teacher “mum” in front of the entire class. It took me some time to live that one down.

Also, last year I took a course at uni on biopsychology. Our lecturer used to write poems and songs about neurotransmitters and such. He would sporadically whip out his guitar and sing to the 300 or so students in the hall to illustrate his points. He was also a terrible singer. What a legend!
bean
May 12th, 2008 at 9:12 am
Man, I was such a bad physics student. I only recognize two of those laws. I was always better with heat conservation.
Onym
May 12th, 2008 at 9:32 am
My ninth grade bio teacher taught us about osmosis and diffusion, and as an example told us about a little trick her brothers had taught her:

You can explode a slug in a glass of water. All you have to do is dry it out with some salt first. After you drop it into the water, the cell membranes can’t handle the sudden change from shriveled up to immersed. They try to absorb too much water and they burst. This can happen to humans too, in a different way. Football players who have been practicing in extremely hot conditions then may try and go chug like 4 gallons of water and occaisionally one or two dies of massive cell loss.

I’ve never tried doing that to a slug, so I technically can’t say with certainty that it works, but I definitely remember that if nothing else from ninth grade bio. Also the time some kid wrote on his test that an advantage of sexual as opposed to asexual reproduction was that it was fun.

Oh, and in Zoology we had to watch a video about how a certain species of flatworm engages in “penis fencing” (that’s actually what it’s called, you can look it up) as a mating ritual. The loser gets penetrated and has to bear the eggs and therefore the burden of motherhood.
Dan
May 12th, 2008 at 9:38 am
As a teenager, I very much enjoyed the hands-on aspect of high school physics. I was especially fascinated by the principles of light, lasers, and the large Fresnel lens. It was hard for me, however, to concentrate enough on the rote memorization aspect of the class, and I ended up taking it more than once, ultimately passing just by the skin of my teeth.
I eventually went on to a career as a Registered Nurse, and found myself working with a large, multi-person hyperbaric chamber, where patients are exposed to a pressurized environment and given highly concentrated oxygen to breathe (when compressed to three times normal atmospheric pressure, one breath of 100% oxygen contains as many oxygen molecules as three breaths of oxygen at normal pressure).
Part of my job became teaching the principles of hyperbaric medicine to other RNs and hyperbaric technicians. I included discussions of Boyle’s Law, Dalton’s Law, Henry’s Law, Charles’ Law, and Gay-Lussac’s Law. In my powerpoint presentation, the title of this section of the teaching is:
“Physics 101: All the things you ignored in high school, but now, through some cruel twist of fate, have again become pertinent to your life”
mfeller
May 12th, 2008 at 9:44 am
In high school we ended up taking physics before calculus. This made it difficult to understand some of the concepts. In particular, my physics teacher always had difficulties teaching vectors and came up with a solution to make vectors a bit more fun. Once a day when the class would get frustrated he would allow one student to come to the head of the class, pick up his toy velociraptor and pull it’s leg, which would cause the velociraptor to let out a loud rrraaaawwwwww! This became so much fun, that students had to vie to be the one who could come to the front of the class and be the source of laughter and release.

Eventually physics actually became one of our favorite classes and we chipped in some money at the end of the year to buy the teacher some additional vocal dinosaurs.

I only wish we had something of similar value to help me get past Quantum Mechanics in College.
Steven Brown
May 12th, 2008 at 9:47 am
In my physics I lab, we were experimenting with these little boxes that generate a small, high-voltage spark periodically. The boxes also had a roll of paper tape that was covered on one side by a fine graphite powder. The idea was that the sparks create burn marks on the graphite. One use is to demonstrate gravitational acceleration; tie a weight to the tape, turn on the machine, and let it drop. The marks get further and further apart.

So anyway, teacher was on the other side of the room, and I was bored, so started messing with it, trying to get one long burn mark. It did not occur to me that graphite is in fact quite conductive. Mother Nature kindly reminded me of this fact by sending an incredible electric shock through my body. To describe it as painful may not be quite accurate, but I was sure awake afterwards. I gave a shout of surprise, and my teacher glanced over, and casually mentioned that any equipment that I broke I would have to replace. I don’t think she realized what had happened.
neko
May 12th, 2008 at 9:57 am
i have a couple stories.

the first one is how i independently discovered that radio waves are a type of light when i was little. i finally talked my parent into getting me a pair of walkie-talkies. i taped one into the transmit position and hid it downstairs, then went to my room with the other one. well, downstairs, my dad dropped something and the sound came through the walkie-talkies a split second faster than through the air. that blew my little kid mind.

the second one is a little shorter. for some lesson that i just can’t remember, my high school science teacher liked filling a plastic bag with the gas that the bunsen burners run on, letting it float, then setting it on fire. he claims by doing that, he set off the sprinklers in the new building for the first time after they were installed.
Andini
May 12th, 2008 at 10:08 am
In my high school physics classroom, there was a small weight attached to a spring attached to the ceiling at the front of the room. It served as a quick, convenient demonstration of simple harmonic motion.

One day, and I don’t recall the motivation, my physics teacher, Mr. Bellof, thought the spring could support him in a Tarzan-like vine swing maneuver. So he got onto a chair, held onto the spring and jumped. The spring quickly ripped out of the ceiling, and my teacher crashed to the floor. The classroom was chaos as this all happened. For the rest of the year (and the next, I think) there was a hole in the ceiling where the string was attached.

A quick bit extra about my physics teacher(s)…
Both times I took physics (regular and AP), the other teacher was in a class just across the call. These two teachers were the ultimate duo. When the opportunity for an inside joke came up (at least 3 times a day it seems), my teacher would walk near the door and yell (largely incomprehensibly) “Mr. Welter!” Seconds later, the other teacher would come zipping in the door…kind of like Kramer on Seinfeld. They’d engage in their quick joke and the other teacher would dart back to his classroom.

And just one more: One day Mr. Bellof stepped out of the room for a minute, and while he did, a student passing by in the hallway came in and drew a penis shape on the chalkboard. Then he slid the over chalkboard over it and left. When Bellof came back, he continued the lecture, but when he came to need more space on the board, he lifted it and saw the drawing. He stared for a few seconds and said, “Oh, a penis,” and continued to write on top of it.

In my book, these were some of the best teachers I ever had. I could go on and on with funny stories.

In fact I just thought of one more…our class went outside for a mini field trip because we were learning about reflection and refraction and were going to see it demonstrated with the sun. After the demo, Mr. Bellof made us drop our books and things, circle up and hold hands. We merrily ran in the circle (like ring around the rosie) and he had us all chant: “We! Are! Physics! Geeks!” It was ridiculous.
Charles Kelly
May 12th, 2008 at 11:19 am
During my first semester Organic chemistry course we had a substitute professor. Before the lecture, he said I want you all to know about my new son. He then put a picture up of the baby boy in his arms reading our organic chem textbook. He said, “Last night, my son finished McMurray (the author of the textbook). He then said, “Today my son finished Payla (the Advanced Organic textbook)”, and showed another picture of his son reading this textbook. Finally, he said, “I then told him all of you were still on McMurray, and this is what he did.” and projected a big picture of the baby laughing with a loud sound byte.
kdub
May 12th, 2008 at 11:52 am
My father told me this story years ago. When he was a chemical engineer in college, he had a lab on Saturday mornings at 8am. It was so hard to get up for the lab that occasionally he and his lab partner had to do things to motivate themselves. When they were told at the end of a lab that in the next session the students would be testing their own urine, and given specimen jars, they had an idea. The next Saturday my dad and his lab partner showed up with full specimen jars and proceeded, along with the other students, to perform a number of tests on the contents, dutifully recording the findings. At the end of lab, my dad and his lab partner turned to each other with their now half-empty specimen jars, toasted, and drank the contents! After they could stop laughing at the other students’ horrified expressions they explained that it was apple juice.
Scot
May 12th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
My single contribution to science was my driving my Organic Chemistry instructor crazy with my creative use of chemical nomenclature and reaction series whenever I drew a blank on what it was I was supposed to know. (I assumed the “Baffle them with BS” policy). These included my submitting odes to my favorite functional group (alcohol!), drawing pictures of the adventures of “Ether Bunny and his girlfriend, Ester”, numerous stupid puns (”The Chemistry hotel has a good nitrate”) and creative reaction series such as my derivation of “ST-oic acid” that didn’t react to anything. I even wrote a small opera on life as a chemistry major that I recently updated to have my main character communicate with is friends with his “sulfone.”

I would like to report that I got an “A” in Organic Chemistry- my second time through it.
Erica
May 12th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
I’ve been teaching college physics labs for three years. The funniest thing that I think ever happened came right after I announced that the last day’s report would be a “turn in before you leave” worksheet (rather than a formal report). One of my male students - who was friendly with everyone - came up and gave me a gigantic hug, then a kiss on the cheek, very loudly and with pomp. My eyes must have looked like saucers, as I had no idea what to do. He gets halfway back to his desk - pauses, half turns with a mortified look on his face - and asks:

“Was that sexual harassment?”

I replied: “…little bit?” - just to watch him go green. And then we had a nice laugh.
Adria_99
May 12th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
In university I studied Zoology and the toughest courses were in invertebrate zoology. My friends and I spent hours studying in the library in preparation for the beastly “bell ringer” exams. Studiousness invariably gave way to rampant silliness after several hours of memorizing the differences between spiral and radial cleavage. We started making jokes about the mating habits of the animals we were studying and these were some of the results.
Flatworms show a distinct lack of consideration for their mates. We imagined what it would be like to be a flat worm female. You could be just minding your own business, swimming along, when suddenly you felt a sharp pain in your side. You look down and to your dismay you see a gaping hole in your belly. Are you mortally wounded? Have you been attacked by a predator? Are you about to be eaten? The answer is no. What has happened is that a male has taken a shine to you and to profess his undying love has punctured you with his hypodermic penis. Congratulations, you’re pregnant!

Then we imagined the lazy barnacle. The barnacle has the largest penis to body ratio of any organism. The male barnacle needs this immense length in order to find a female that may be several barnacles away. We thought about what a human male would do with such a penis. Picture a lazy man lying on the couch in his boxers watching TV or perhaps just waking up from a nap. As he sits up, he rubs the drool from his chin and realizes that he is in the mood for some loving. His mate is no where to be seen and he is still feeling sleepy. What should he do? Since he doesn’t want to get up he sends his male organ out on the hunt to find his partner, “Honey! Honey are you there? Where are you?”. Love without ever having to leave the couch!
Our favorite was snail foreplay. Snails do not have the benefit of a nice bottle of wine or Barry White to help them prepare their mates for some candooling. So how do you think they tell their mates that they are in the mood? First, they tenderly cuddle up beside each other and then, when the mood is just right …. they shoot each other! That’s right, they shoot their beloved in the neck with a dart made of calcium. How’s that for smooth?
Now five years later I may not remember the difference between acoelomates, pseudocoelomates and coelomates but I sure do remember their mating habits.
Robert Brandin
May 12th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
My first organic chemistry lab instructor told me that in his undergraduate days, they had a bit of a roach problem in the lab. Whenever they removed the panels that housed the ventilation ducts, roaches would pour out of the wall. He had two methods of dispatching them. The first involved spraying them with acetone then lighting them on fire, which must’ve smelled lovely in lab. His second, more disgusting method involved DMSO (Dimethylsulfoxide). Evidently, chitin in soluble in DMSO, so as soon as you sprayed in on the roaches, they would pretty much melt like slugs. I have to wonder who got the job of cleaning up the roach sludge.

(This instructor also told me about the halcyon days when he would take a coffee can, put a huge chunk of sodium metal in it, then toss it in a lake and shoot it with a shotgun. What I wouldn’t give to be a chemist in those days)

I also had a gifted physical chemistry instructor who decided one class period we would go out into the common area and spend the entire period doing the “electron ballet,” a dance which involved us running around in circles orbiting each other and exchanging electrons in a weird balletic red rover game. God that class was fun.

Finally (I’m totally cheating by making this a threefer+), during a synthesis class, a classmate of mine had to generate hydrochloric acid gas. The way you do this is by VERY slowly dropping hydrochloric acid into sulfuric acid. This generates an insane amount of heat, but if you do it slowly and ice the reaction vessel, usually it’s no problem. This guy turned the stopcock on flask holding HCl a bit too fast. Immediately he knew there was a problem, so he slammed his fumehood shut. Within about 5 seconds, his entire glassware setup and anything else that was under the hood essentially vaporized. Needless to say, the lab instructor was not happy.

These are just tidbits. I graduated from an engineering school, and environment which breeds just about the weirdest and most brilliant professors and classmates.
Jeff Lieberman
May 12th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
My favorite lab story involves a demonstration of pH and the difference between using litmus paper as a qualitative measure and using an electronic pH meter. My dimwitted professor decided to use concentrated nitric acid for the one of the test solutions. The student in front of me dipped the litmus paper into the acid and proceeds to shake the paper like someone would shake down a thermometer. As I was laughing to myself why someone would shake litmus paper, I started to feel an itching sensation on my arms and legs. The nitwit had managed to spray acid all over me. I ended up embarrassed under the safety shower with Swiss cheese holes all over my pants and shirt. I still have scars on my arm!
Jeb
May 12th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Two stories:

In first grade, during recess one day, I decided to try something I’d been curious about. Most of the kids in the class had just figured out how to push themselves on the swing set, and I became fascinated with the motion of the swing, particularly how the ropes seemed to go slack the closer the swinger got to the top of the swing set. I decided to try and recreate the effect on the monkey bars. The monkey bars ran perpendicular to the base of a small hill on the playground, and I decided the best way to do this would be to run down the hill at full speed, jump and grab onto one of the bars and swing up, hoping to feel my arms go slack like the ropes. It worked, to a certain point. I ran down the hill, jumped, grabbed the bar, and successfully swung up so that my body was now parallel with the ground, around six feet in the air. And just as I’d predicted, my arms went slack… and then I lost my grip and fell flat on my back; it knocked the wind right out of me. When I got back to class, I asked the teacher to explain what happened, as it was a Montessori school, she sat down and explained (in very general terms) centripetal force, motion along a curved path, and (unfortunately) gravity. It was then I knew I wanted to study physics.

The second story concerns a college professor, he taught both the quantum mechanics courses at the university I attended. He is a great professor, but he had all these quirky sayings and terms, and used an odd system of units (the speed of light was always 1, to make the math easier, and time was measured in some variation of inverse joules.) One day each semester, someone in the class would create a bingo sheet, with one of his phrases or terms or lines in each box, and the whole class would play bingo during his lecture, without his knowledge, at least until someone stood up and shouted, “bingo!”
Matty
May 12th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
For the longest time, I thought 6.02 x 10^23 was known as “Avocado’s Number.” This was puzzling to me, as I could not comprehend how avocados were a basic unit of measurement in chemistry. My confusion was eventually allayed when I realized that it was “Avogadro’s Number” and that guacomole does not, in fact, appear on the periodic table of elemnts.
Scott J
May 12th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
I had a pretty dim neighbor in school that was fun to prank. He asked me one day about what I did in biochemistry and I got a serious look on my face, looked around, and told him we were making life. Every time I saw him after that I would act like I was hiding something in my pocket or hug my notebook close to my chest as I scurried off. Toward the end of the semester I got a small jar and put a dead bee in it and corked it. I then put a label on it that something like “#43-possible amino acid complex- November, 1999″ to make it look like it was one of a number of failures. I left it out in the open and let him find it. Once he did I acted mad and upset that he found it and swore him to secrecy on it since I was “working on something for DARPA to bring things back to life.”

I kept this up the next semester until spring rolled around with its obligatory bee activity. I got another jar and put a label on it with “Synth March 9- No.114- coAMp + gCNA” and put a living bee in it. I heard my neighbor out I the hallway and I yelled “YES!” and then ran out the door leaving it open. Naturally, he entered my room and saw the living bee in the jar and thought I had actually synthesized a bee.

I also left out a notepad with drawings and scribbles to make it look like I was attaching a small camera and microphone on Frankenbee114 and had notes about working with Kyle in the EE department.

He was so flipped out that he wouldn’t talk to me anymore and I heard he was telling people he was nervous about his neighbor (me) and what he (I) was working on. I kept this up until the end of the school year when I came clean with him. It took me two weeks to convince him that Frankenbee114 was really 5 or 6 bees I kept catching and putting in the same jar to prank him.
CheeseDuck
May 12th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Woah. You people write alot.
jay
May 12th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
I willingly went to college for physics (and succeeded) and am now working on a second degree in materials science. Does that count?

In my senior lab, my friend and I had to do a project using 123 (high temperature) superconductors. We decided to take some of the liquid nitrogen and pour it into a 20-ounce plastic bottle. After taking it outside, my friend screwed on the lid and threw the bottle into some bushes. Next thing we know, the plastic bottle cap came flying out of the bushes (along with a bunch of leaves) and pegged my friend in the forehead. He had a small welt for the next two days. The only thing he could do that night was drink while everyone else laughed their butts off.
Viola
May 12th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
High school chemistry class. My teacher was demonstrating the traits of the different metallic elements when she accidentally dropped one of the pieces in the sink.

“Oh, shoot!” she said, “That was sodium.”

Genius that she was, my teacher decided to use that as another part of her lesson. She filled a beaker with water and dumped it into the sink.

BOOM.

The water pipe exploded.

She’s still teaching there, unfortunately.
Pete
May 12th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
In 7th grade, my adventurous earth science teacher wanted to give the class an example of centrifugal force. (If you have seen Family Guy, this was my Mr Farkas.) Long story short, he used his belt and a bottle of liquid paper to make the example. So Mr. Farkas starts spinning the belt with the liquid paper in it’s loop above his head.Instead of staying securely contained within the loop, the belt acts more like a sling than anything and the liquid paper shoots out at a high rate of speed and smashes against the wall, directly above my head. I suppose not being drilled in the face with a flying jar of “white out” was a good thing, but I still had to spend the rest of the day with it all in my hair. Not to mention covering my sweet “Cult” concert shirt.
Viola
May 12th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Not going to lie, I am all for Andini winning one of the books. Everyone loves a penis joke.
NeuroGirl
May 12th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
I teach labs for three different sciences and have acquired cautionary tales for all of them. For some reason, college students think that reading the lab manual is optional… There was a girl in my advanced animal phys lab who hated wearing protective gear (lab coats are required, face shields, haircovers and gloves are highly recommended). I kicked her out of lab twice for not wearing a lab coat. During one of our rat surgeries to test the effects of antihistamine on production of stomach acid, the process involves decanulating the stomach by inserting a lipped tube from the intestines to the sphincter of the stomach and then tying it off to collect the stomach contents. The rats were supposed to have been fasted, but the tech forgot, so the stomachs were full. Ignoring not only the order of ops for the surgery, but also my warning to cut gently, she tied tight ligatures at both ends of the stomach and set at the stomach proper with a scalpel. She leaned in close, only a few inches from where she was cutting, and dug in. The ligatures were too tight. The chunky, pink-brown stomach contents exploded all over her face. Of course she started screaming bloody murder and crying. I, professional that I am, managed to run out into the hall before I cracked up.
Jim
May 12th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
This one from home, rather than science class. My mom (a chemical engineer) would often get on my case about keeping a clean room. She explained that the messy room was a state of greater entropy. By failing to keep it organized, I was recklessly dissipating free energy and hastening the heat death of the universe. Of course, after covering thermodynamics in high school physics, I was able to defend my habits more effectively. I pointed out that the room becoming messy was a spontaneous process, but restoring it to a state of order required additional work. Since no process is 100% efficient, picking up the room will only result in a greater increase in disorder somewhere else.
Otter
May 12th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
My tenth grade chemistry teacher is easily one of the nicest people I will ever meet. He knows how to teach a class and have fun with it in a perfect combination. We always said that his classes were 15 minutes of life lessons, and 30 minutes of chem. If I was to list all of the things that have been amusing in that class, this post would go on forever.
To begin with, he has an obsession with chocolate, especially M and M’s. We were always told to imagine electrons as green M and M’s, and he would include these on his powerpoint presentations. Also, he had tons of little sayings to help us remember things. The best thing about him was how confident he was with himself. He would make fun of himself and the students, and we returned in kind. If we didn’t know the answer to a question, he would say, “Yes? No? So’s your momma?” (To which we replied the latter, of course.)
Most importantly, he taught us the three answers to life: bonding structures, molecular mass, and chocolate.
fz
May 13th, 2008 at 12:38 am
Archimedes kept in shape
Erik
May 13th, 2008 at 6:57 am
In 5th grade, we had a science demonstration that involved burning sugar. Obviously, this produced a bit of smoke. Just as one of my classmates said, “wouldn’t it be funny if the smoke alarm went off?”, sure enough, it did.

Of course, this triggered the fire alarm for the entire school. So he we were, laughing and carrying on, while all the other kids were evacuating as orderly as possible, the teachers had looks of “there’s not a fire drill scheduled,” and the principal, in a panic, sprinted down the outside stairs towards our classroom to see if his school was going up in flames.

I think the burning sugar experiment was suspended after that.
PaisleyDazey
May 13th, 2008 at 7:52 am
This book looks great!

My freshman General Chem lab was a total disaster most days. One day stands out in particular. My group of friends in that lab had gotten the reputation of being the last to understand stuff, bugged the teacher with the most questions and were always the last ones out of the lab. We called ourselves the “speds” (special ed kids). This one day it was the end of class and we were supposed to finish up our experiments and clean up…our professor stepped out for a few minutes. One of my lab partners was quickly trying to heat a test tube over the Bunsen burner and it exploded on her, and another lab partner got startled by the sound and dropped the teachers stapler, which he had been holding, into a vat of waste chemicals. Meanwhile I had walked over to the sink to dump out my test tube, not realizing that the waste product was supposed to be collected into a separate container, and when it hit the water in the bottom of the sink it created this purple smoke cloud. I was panicking not knowing if I had just created some toxic gas. (I don’t remember what experiment we were working on) All this happened pretty much simultaneously, and our professor waked back into the room right in the middle of it. He just gave us this priceless look that told us he though we would all have bright futures as Wal-Mart greeters. Luckily we survived all those years of chem labs and our many other screw-ups, and now one of us is a science teacher, one is a physical therapist and I am the assistant manager of a toxicity lab.
Julia
May 13th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Fascinating!

This is not a really great story, but it’s one of my proudest moments.

My first hour class my senior year of high school was Physics. By the last quarter of the year, to combat the “senioritis” that had set in, our teacher offered a prize to whoever could make it to class on time every day for that whole last quarter. My best friend and I were able to accomplish that feat (no small achievement when the classroom was across the school from our lockers), and we were the proud recipients of “I (heart) physics” bumperstickers. Mine is still on my guitar case, over a decade later.
ron
May 14th, 2008 at 10:45 am
In science class when I was about 10-11 years old we did an experiment to make chlorine gas. we were told it was dangerous and not to breath it in. as I wanted to see what happened if somebody did breath it I volunteered a boy who’s father was an officer in the army and not the brightest of people.I prepared a very small test-tube of the gas and said smell this. he took the tube and instead of sniffing gently breathed the whole lot in one big sniff! he hit the floor with a dull thud, I was rewarded with three strokes of the cane across my rear end by the headmaster.. (they could do that in English schools 50 years ago and worse!) You have to make personal sacrifices and sufferings in the pursuit of truth in science.
Mark White
May 14th, 2008 at 11:48 am
Everybody is familiar with the scientific “law” in biology that “sequence determines structure.” This means that the genetic code translates only one dimension of information from DNA to protein. What most people don’t know is that this law was never actually proven; it was taken on faith for expedience only. In fact, it is now hard to imagine any more ways in which it could be proven false since even “silent” mutations are empirically shown to change the shape of folded proteins! One now must wonder about the utility of scientific laws. My funny story is that I invented a geometrical toy and was working on a language for it when I realized that it modeled the genetic code in three dimensions. When I began to investigate the scientific basis for the law of biology that sequence determines structure, I found that it is little more than a hoax. It does more to mislead our thinking than it does to further our understanding of biology. I would like to win a copy of the book to see if it has a section about George Gamow. If not, perhaps the sequel will. Gamow proposed a model for the genetic code that turned out to be perfectly wrong. However, in his perfect failure he proved to be the only early investigator to hit on the right idea. More info at http://www.codefun.com
Alex
May 14th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Great stories, guys! It was tough to pick just three out of so many great ones, but Cliff had told me his picks: Congrats to William Mullins, Andini, and NeuroGirl! They’ll each receive a personalized copy of Cliff’s book.

Thank you to Cliff for his generous offer and to everyone for the great comments!
Michael J
May 14th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
I have never been a good student EVER! Nor did I pay attention in any of my science classes especially Astronomy. I really ejoyed these posts and I learned a few things about the physics of our universe. Thank you all!;-)
jake abf
May 16th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
While touring Cape Kennedy over 15 years ago and the displays there. I asked a lady tour guide how do women take a leak in space, how do folks take a shit and not have that stuff scattered all over the place, ‘cuz shortly before that I read about problems astronauts were having with animal experiments in space and all the animal detritus floating around.

To help astronauts stay in 1 spot they put in a steel mesh floor whereby a square plug fastened to their boots to push into that floor mesh. Women use a suction device with a vacuum nozzle when they had to go.

The animal detritus was also eventually vacuum suctioned when they perfected devices that work in space. These were actually gravity creating devices designed to work in non-gravity, a truly masterful piece of practical engineering.

From what I was told at Redstone Arsenal where they train astronauts in how to function in weightlessness, one task was to swim and defecate into a diaper. Try it some time, it ain’t as easy as it sounds. But that is how astronauts learn how to solve non-gravity problems.
Dan
May 18th, 2008 at 8:54 am
I had a lot of fun in high school chemistry classes. We had a teacher who was probably insane but was a fairly intelligent old guy who wore old jackets with elbow pads and, so, was called eccentric. Best class ever was on the reactivity series and involved sodium into a petri dish of water in a fume cabinet. The little ball of sodium spun and fizzed around a bit and even caught fire. Interesting.

That apparently wasn’t good enough, so our teacher decided to demonstrate issues of scale. He kitted us out with face masks and riot shields (don’t know where he got those, and I’m not interested in exploring how he got them for legal reasons), picked up his jar of sodium and other bits and pieces and took us down to the teacher’s car park in front of the school.

With mechanical long tongs and effusive warnings for us not to ever do this (ever ever), he dropped a much larger piece of sodium into a beaker of water. The results were one large bang, a small mushroom cloud rising into the air, the apparent disintegration of the plastic beaker and a small portion of the tarmac, a former-English teacher principal peering out the school office window and our science teacher screaming “COOL LETS DO THAT AGAIN WITH HCl!!!”

We didn’t. The principal came out and had words with him about OH&S and nice new cars and so on. So we went back to the classroom with him muttering about, next time using Potassium or maybe Lithium all the way.

Issues of scale came up again and again and again that year, it’s honestly a wonder none of us were killed that year. Great teacher, though. He retired the year after, but I met him at a train station once and he still has a crazy glint in his eyes.

I’m a teacher now partially due to his inspiring me. I work full time with gifted students who are much more devious than he ever was and probably much smarter than I ever was. Every day I take my life and my health/accident insurance policy in my hands.
falling.gator
May 29th, 2008 at 11:41 pm
I would also recommend reading “The Scientists” by John Gribbin (Random House, 2002). It has fascinating biographical accounts of scientists from Copernicus to modern day and includes a layman’s explanation of their theories.

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