The hour badly spent

My best friend broke his right arm three weeks ago. Unable to drive a stickshift, he let me borrow his Mustang all week. You know what’s more fun than using a muscle car to pick up hot chicks?

Using a muscle car to run over hot chicks.

Although aluminum doesn’t normally burn, Professor Sorenson demonstrated in physics lecture that if you take a strip of it - with a wide surface area - and toss it into a bunsen burner, you will yield a nice dramatic poof, with an explosion as big and bright as fireworks.

Sorenson thought explosions are so kewl (because face it: they are) that he did it again. And again. After his third go, however, the fire alarm activated: flashing lights and a faraway whistley noise. Peter, a physics GTA, stuck his head in the door to see if we were still alive.

"This the only room it’s going off in?" asked Sorenson.

"Whole building," Peter said.

And so we filed outside, hung out with everyone else who was in the building, and waited for the fire department to swing by to take care of the alarm thingie. After we had been out there for 15 minutes, Sorenson disappeared inside with one of the firemen. When he came back, he addressed the cheering mob of students who could not wait to get back to class:

"I was burning aluminum in a bunsen burner, and apparently the smoke from the demonstration activated the fire alarm. The problem now is that we can’t shut the alarm off. You know, when my smoke alarm goes off at home, I just grab my ball pein hammer and beat the shit out of it. But it looks like we can’t do that here."

"In other news, this will be my last semester at K-State. Just kidding."

Professor, don’t toy with our emotions like that. And when you really do have to go, don’t half-ass anything; be sure to leave with a bang. 

In Tuesday’s physics lecture, Sorenson explained that while sugar water is electrically bland, salt water is conductive.

"Say you’ve got an electric shaver while you’re in a tub of salt water. Say you drop the shaver. What happens? Well, you stop shaving."

Duh.

"Here. I’ll prove it."

Now I sat up. Sorenson strikes me as the type of drunk old man who casually hunts and kills angry hydras for breakfast. Was he really about to hop into a tub of water hooked up to electrodes and have nothing happen to him? I wouldn’t have been surprised, but as it turns out, he just had some hookup to get electricity from a small vat of water. The drunk old man theory, however, picked up weight as he entreated us to further ponder the concept of solubility:

"Do alcohol and water mix? You bet. They’re in my beer."

After he finished the lecture, he decided it might be fun to show us some real mixin’. So he made us cluster around a table and started pouring shit from bottles into beakers that had other shit in it.

Nothing happened.

"There’s some rule about solubility," he explained. "Either you’re supposed to add acid to water or water to acid. I’ve never been able to remember which."

At this, he re-did the procedure correctly. Meanwhile, we all started inching away in terror. "Yeah, you might wanna stand back," Sorenson advised. Chuckling.

Thanks for the tip. But teacher, seriously, why do you have on those enormous fucking goggles, and will the rest of us need a pair?

The awesomeness of my physics lecture soared to new heights today. Professor Sorenson, an old-fashioned raconteur, likes to pepper his lectures with cunning insights ("Homework: it’s a good way to learn shit") and instructive metaphors ("Atoms are ticklish, and start to pair up because of chemical desires"). But today, he finally went the distance and just blew shit up.

He filled up a steel bulb with water and let it sit in a vertical cylinder. Then he doused it with a vat of liquid nitrogen. "Watch what happens," he said, ducking out through the emergency exit. "I’ll just wait over here," he snickered.

So we waited.

And waited.

Pow!

As the water in the bulb froze, it expanded. And expanded some more. At last, the steel - notoriously weak compared to my pecs - couldn’t take it any more, and the bulb exploded (a metaphor for my heart on Valentine’s Day!). The tube shat steam and shrapnel up 20 feet. It was pretty rad. Sorenson let me keep some of the bomb fragments. I took them home, melted them down, and forged Excalibur.