Surely sodium silicate is called waterglass, not isinglass. Isinglass comes from the swim bladders of fish, I believe. Nice video - I often wondered how that was done.
I'm so excited! I recommended to my Chemistry Club teacher to do this experiment tomorrow at the next meeting, and he said that we might do it! :) Thanks for the great idea, everyone at Periodic Videos!
WOW ! That was beautiful, I've never seen one before. I assume they eventually stop growing, but do they continue to look like plants or do you land up with dirty water ?
When I was younger I made a crystal garden, and then when I got a bit of chemistry on my mind I wondered what it might react with. Turns out it reacted with Listerine of all things and made some weird soapy substance.
The reason people used to need to preserve eggs is because chickens don't naturally lay during winter. The only reason we can buy fresh eggs now is because it is economically viable for businesses to extend the amount of light they are exposed to each day artificially.
@mariomario42 Zero gravity is shorthand for the shuttle being in freefall (i.e. orbit) so things in the shuttle don't feel an outside force acting on them. There is still a gravitational force but it's just keeping the shuttle going around its orbit.
@YamiPoyo Young's experiment just had weird implications in reality, but wasn't really interesting to look at. The newer version where they fire one photon at a time was cool, but again, not something you can look at. The extreme temperature experiments are the only visually cool thing in physics (I think anyway).
I'm not sure if anyone mentions it in the comments, but when Prof Poliakoff refers to Sodium Silicate as Isinglass, he is actually incorrect. The archaic name for Sodium Silicate is Water Glass. Isinglass on the other hand, is the finings made for clearing beer in the brewing process, made from the swim bladder of fish (usually cod or sturgeon).
So is it possible to grow metallic rather than ionic crystals in a similar way? Bismuth crystals that grew over time would be fascinating, as they're mesmerising just to look at geometrically in the first place.
I've made one of these when I was young child and was always amused by the organic like reaction but knowing they were just transition metals. I always was interested in chemistry and this video takes me back. Great video
In case someone is interested in reading the paper about chemical gardens in zero gravity Professor Poliakoff is talking about, its title can be seen at 6:00 and it's "The Silicate Garden Reaction in Microgravity: A Fluid Interfacial Instability". The PMID is 9705766, the DOI is 10.1006/jcis.1998.5447 You know what to do.
I was just thinking about the space experiments. I first pondered about how astronaughts practise weightlessness in swimming pools. But that wouldn't work, because this essentially is a swimming pool. But what about making the host fluid less dense? If you can find a chemical less dense than what is being formed here, you could mix it with the current solution, or potentially replace some of the water content to find the appropriate balance. Also different chemicals would have different boyancy?
Talking about space. Brady, have you had any conversation with the professors (chem or physics) about the NASA press conference? The Sun said, that it might be about a life form on earth, that uses arsenic in some biological process. And by the way: could you imagine making a video about biomolecules? It has now been 47 years since Watson and Crick published their paper on "Molecular structure of nucleic acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid"
ohh I'd like to see what would happen if it was in much less liquid.. when the tendrils hit the surface of the solution would they veer off in one direction or follow a crazy random pattern? :p
