Monday, October 13, 2008

http://www.theodoregray.com/

i came across this cool website made by this extremely imba person! he is an element collector - he collects samples of all the elements, at least the non-radioactive and stabler radioactive ones, in their pure elemental form!

look, he has cesium, the most reactive alkali metal, and a nice amount of it too! Cesium creates the craziest explosions ive ever seen lol. 'a depth charge in a bathtub', to quote a brainiac show i one watched which involved releasing it into a bathtub of water.

but the real epitome of WIN in his collection is none other than this:

elemental FLUORINE. the most electronegative element, one of the strongest oxidising agents, blah blah blah. it eats anything that comes into contact with, even glass you try to store it in lol. and this guy managed to get hold of a transparent container containing it inside!!!!

lol if you go and read the prodcedure its ridiculously elaborate. you have to take a special kind of quartz tube and heat it until only SiO is there and the Si-OH and the ends is not. and i think you got to do that at dunno how many hundred calvin. then when you pump the fluorine in the vacuum tube must be sacrificed because it will be eaten by the fluorine LOL. and whats more, you got to surround the whole tube with liquid nitrogen to freeze/condense out the water and HF molecules that your fluorine will be contaminated with, so that they cannot initiate the chain reaction that will cause fluorine to react with the tube. some people really got alot of time and money man...im jealous ><

chemistry is fun!

- sqrt(1-v^2/c^2)