Question: Has any of your experiments ever gone wrong?

Jess Wade answered on 19 Jun 2015:

They’ve gone horribly wrong!

I’ve been working with tiny amounts of expensive molecules that cost maybe £1500 a gram. When you cook at home, you use hundreds of grams of flour and butter to make a cake, but that is okay because they are super cheap. To use this molecules I use something called milligrams, which are 0.001 of a gram! Super small.
When we get them we could only get 0.003 g! So then when you dissolve it in a liquid to make a conductive ink, you have a TINY amount- less than a rain drop. I have to be so careful not to spill these expensive things over, but sometimes I do and they spill and it is AWFUL!

Sometimes when I’m heating my molecules up to 350 C they set on fire ! Then there are some awful smells. Once something did a weird thing called ‘subliming’- it changed straight from a solid to a gas without becoming liquid. That’s like an ice cube becoming steam without being water! It went everywhere, and painted the ceiling of our lab neon orange!

A cooking example: me and my dad have competitions to see who can cut the celery and carrots the smallest. Once we spent about two hours preparing all of the ingredients and browning the meat, then we added a cube of fish stock rather than beef stock! Nightmare! We had to throw the whole thing away! That wasn’t the best experiment but it was the funniest !