Blog 2.6 Bruce Jr's Science Lessons

     Week 7 of the blog that no one really looks at. This week I'm going to be explaining a spectroscope and how it shows our understanding of what light is. It splits the white light we see everyday into a spectrum of light, because white is the combination of every other color. So, the spectroscope allows us to see all of the different energy levels of the light, and it  allows us to see the heat released from a reaction or something occurring naturally, and let's us determine the energy level.

    This picture is off of google, because getting something this clear in the classroom is almost impossible. In chemistry, we used a paper towel tube with a slit in the end to copy this effect, and it then allowed us to see the rainbow of color you see here. This tool also allows us to see that light bends and can go into this slit and create a band of light. This tool allows us to see the in the world around us, light and life are all just energy moving around us. 

Blog 2.5 Bruce Jr's Science Lessons

    It's widely known in science that energy cannot be destroyed nor created, it can only be changed. Light sticks and lightning bugs are all examples of this, and they also release light in dark or dim situations. This effect is called chemiluminescence, which is basically just light being released as a result of a chemical reaction. So to help demonstrate this I made my own lightning bug solution, using bleach, water, liquid lye, and luminol. When the substance are mixed together they emit a bright blue glow for about ten seconds as you can see.

    This reaction is what happens when bonds break. When a bond is broken it releases energy, or even sometimes when a bond is formed. The compounds carrying oxygen in the reaction decompose, and allow the oxygens to oxidize the luminol all while emitting blue light. The substance in the dark appears blue, but when the lights were on it actually looked like a watered down apple juice. I'd hope for me to be able to keep using the lab so I can bring more cool experiments in, and for next week I hope to do something much cooler. See you next time!

 

Blog 2.4 Bruce Jr's Science Lessons

     Boom! Crack! Pop! All sounds that we know and interpret through our ears, but how exactly does sound work? Think of the air around you as a pudding-like substance, and sound is a vibration moving through the pudding. Sound is an electromagnetic wave that is just based off of motion. As I'm beginning to go through each of these I'm seeing I'm learning things myself as well. In order to explain sound in a demonstration I went back to a classic kid pastime.

    The cup phones that we see on Grown Ups are a perfect demonstration of how sound is just vibrations and motion. As one kid speaks into one cup, the vibrations travel along the line in-between the cups and once it reaches the other end, the vibrations are then transformed back into sound and are received as sound by the person on the receiving end. So from now on instead of thinking of sound as an invisible ghost, think of it as a liquid that flows from the mouth to the ear. The air arounds us allows sound to travel, and therefore, without air we couldn't breathe or speak.