Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Deadguy" data-source="post: 1412622" data-attributes="member: 2480">You've seen that too?The UK Open University used to have a classic chemsitry course programme that showed the different reactivities of the alkaline metals, Li through Cs. I actually knew the guy who was the demonstrator for those filmed experiments (it was filmed at the University of Nottingham). He said that the quantity of caesium used was supposed to have been judged small enough to be safe. He was as surprised as anyone when the heavy glass tank just exploded! Of course, the director was delighted!I had a friend who did a PhD on caesium chemistry and it is seriously not nice stuff! I used to accompany him to the lab if he had work to do in the evening, since it wasn't considered wise to work alone with caesium (especially when your experiments involve heating the stuff in a sealed vessel at about 600 degC!)Of course, that didn't stop one lecturer handing round a sealed glass tube of the stuff, just so people could see it melt at body heat! Chemsitry lecturers, it seems, are fairly uniformly mad! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>