• Question: What is your favourite experiment to do

    Asked by anon-247940 to Martha, Jennifer, Dan, Ben, Baptiste on 9 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Jennifer Carroll

      Jennifer Carroll answered on 9 Mar 2020:

      My favourite experiment is a chocolate shelf life trial: you get to make the chocolate, taste it, put in a controlled environment (so whatever you are testing for, e.g. how the chocolate reacts to a certain temperature or humidity) for the duration of the test.

      It might be a 2 year test and you try the chocolate every 3 months. Can get kind of grim, the chocolate flavour can change and the texture too. This all determines how long a sell by date goes on your chocolate bar.

    • Photo: Ben Rowsell

      Ben Rowsell answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      One of my favourite experiments to do is making something called ferrocene, which contains iron (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrocene). When doing the experiment you at first get a black mess but when you purify it you get these really cool orange crystals. Other than that I do outreach with school students and we make our own perfumes. This is really cool because you get to leave with your own nice perfume and it’s something you created yourself. However, I’ve also made bad ones that no one would ever want to wear.

    • Photo: Baptiste Ravina

      Baptiste Ravina answered on 11 Mar 2020:

      This one:

      When I’m working on wave equations with my students, they get through the maths fine but usually have trouble understanding how it connects to real world example. I found that experiment was a cool way to show them 🙂

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