• Question: Have you ever had an experiment that went extremely wrong

    Asked by anon-184972 to Callum on 6 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Callum McHugh

      Callum McHugh answered on 6 Nov 2018:


      Goodness, yes quite a few!!

      I was once making a sodium amalgam (this is where you dissolve sodium metal in mercury to give a solid mixture of the two – amalgams are popular in dentistry!!) Dissolving sodium in mercury is highly exothermic and I added too much…the result was the amalgam exploded all over my fumehood.

      Because we were doing the experiment in a fume hood and because I was wearing safety equipment everything was ok…I did get a bit of a surprise!!

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